First of all, I want to welcome the many new subscribers who’ve joined us in The Priory over the week or so. I hope you like what you’ve signed up for! Primarily, we read literature together! We are working our way slowly through a survey of British literature in mainly chronological order and we are smack dab in the middle of the eighteenth century now.

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Now on to this week’s regularly scheduled programming!

With these three chapters detailing Gulliver’s time in the country of the Houyhnhnms, we cover three main topics:

• More details about the odious Yahoos and how they live

• More details about the winsome Houyhnhnms and how they live

• Unsettling details about Houyhnhnms and what they are trying to decide

By now, it is clear that Swift is satirizing the human race in his depiction of the Yahoos. And poor Gulliver is caught in the middle, trying as hard as he can to prove (mostly to himself) that he is not a Yahoo.

The Yahoos have many, many vices:

• They hate one another more than any other species hates its fellow members.

• They are gluttons. They battle over their disgusting food to the point of civil war. With “undistinguished appetites,” they devour all plants and flesh in sight.

• They are greedy. They are “violently fond” of worthless shiny stones they go to great lengths to dig up, hide, and pine away over once taken or lost.

• They are drunkards. They imbibe the juice of some sort of root that makes them “sometimes hug, and sometimes tear one another; they would howl and grin, and chatter, and reel, and tumble, and then fall asleep in the mud.” (This passage always makes me laugh—even without the juice of the root!)

• They are subject to diseases owing to their sordid lifestyles. The cure for these (here’s the Swiftian scatology) is the ingestion of a mixture made of their own urine and dung. (Gulliver pauses to recommend the same treatment to his fellow Europeans at home.)

• They are non-monogamous and full of lust.

• The are disposed toward nastiness and dirt.

• They are hyphochondriac and melancholy. (The description sounds like Swift’s clumsy description of clinical depression, I think.)

  The female Yahoos are catty toward one another.

• Like actual animals, they are “prodigiously nimble from their infancy,” and become violent early on, as Swift discovers after he “catches” one. They even swim from infancy like frogs!

• They are “the most unteachable of all animals.”

• In terms of government, each herd of Yahoos is led by the most deformed and mischievous among them. That leader chooses a favorite whose job it is to “lick his master’s feet and posteriors and drive the female Yahoos to his kennel.” (Ugh. This one hits too close to home.)

Gulliver’s detailed description of all these vices (and more) is much funnier than mine. I hope you read and enjoy them. Clearly—clearly—they are all intended to indict not Yahoo vices, but human vices. Ouch.

As we have had in the first two voyages, there is here a “sex scene.” And is the case when Gulliver is in Lilliput and Brobdingnag, this event alters his perception of himself. Here it occurs when he strips off his clothes in order to swim in a stream, and a female Yahoo runs from out of nowhere and embraces him until Gulliver scares her off. Now, since we know (and Swift knows) that animals mate with their own kind, we know what Gulliver wants so much to deny but can no longer: he is a Yahoo.

Now we get to the Houyhnhms. What a contrast!

• They are “endowed by nature with a general disposition to all virtues. and have no conceptions of ideas of what is evil.”

• They cultivate reason and seek to be governed by it.

• They cannot understand what Gulliver means by “opinion” because pure reason leads only to truth, not opinion.

• Their two chief virtues are friendship and benevolence.

• They love decency and civility but have no need for ceremony.

• They have sex only for procreation.

• They marry based on color in order to produce lovely offspring.

• They cultivate strength in the males and comeliness in the females.

• They teach their young temperance, industry, and exercise.

• They seek one offspring of each sex, and they trade offspring with each other if needed to accomplish that. If one of their offspring dies, they have another.

• Because they don’t get sick or have diseases, they die of old age and are buried in obscurity. They “express no joy nor grief … nor does the dying person discover the least regret that he is leaving the world.” Gulliver relays a story in illustration:

I remember my master having once made an appointment with a friend and his family to come to his house, upon some affair of importance: on the day fixed, the mistress and her two children came very late; she made two excuses, first for her husband, who, as she said, happened that very morning to shnuwnh. The word is strongly expressive in their language, but not easily rendered into English; it signifies, “to retire to his first mother.” Her excuse for not coming sooner, was, that her husband dying late in the morning, she was a good while consulting her servants about a convenient place where his body should be laid; and I observed, she behaved herself at our house as cheerfully as the rest. She died about three months after.

• Every four years meet to be sure hay, oats, cows, Yahoos, and children are distributed evenly. If any family has lost a child to death, and the parents are too old to “breed” another, another family will “supply the loss.”

Okay, dear readers, now it is time to pause and ask, Is this really a utopia?

We’ll return to that question next week in full, but for now, let me remind you what Swift proposed ironically, satirically in A Modest Proposal. Remember?

Chapter 9 opens with Gulliver casually reporting that the Houyhnhnms have gathered in one of their Grand Assemblies to resume a debate on an old question. (Remember, they don’t have a word for “opinion” but the classical understanding of debate was that it would lead to indisputable truth.) This question was “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth?”

Whoa. That should give us pause, dear readers. Think of the worst pest or predator you can think of, the ones that need to be controlled, reduced, or thinned. Would we really want them to be exterminated from the face of the earth? That’s a pretty extreme position, a pretty extreme action to take. (I admit I’d be okay with this when it comes to stinkbugs.)

But it gets worse. The Houyhnhnms relay their understanding that:

Yahoos had not been always in their country; but that many ages ago, two of these brutes appeared together upon a mountain; whether produced by the heat of the sun upon corrupted mud and slime, or from the ooze and froth of the sea, was never known; that these Yahoos engendered, and their brood, in a short time, grew so numerous as to overrun and infest the whole nation; that the Houyhnhnms, to get rid of this evil, made a general hunting, and at last enclosed the whole herd; and destroying the elder, every Houyhnhnm kept two young ones in a kennel, and brought them to such a degree of tameness, as an animal, so savage by nature, can be capable of acquiring, using them for draught and carriage; that there seemed to be much truth in this tradition, and that those creatures could not be yinhniamshy (or aborigines of the land), because of the violent hatred the Houyhnhnms, as well as all other animals, bore them, which, although their evil disposition sufficiently deserved, could never have arrived at so high a degree if they had been aborigines, or else they would have long since been rooted out …

Hear what’s being said here: the Yahoos cannot be an original race because the Houyhnhnms hate them … how’s that for faulty cause and effect?

It’s convenient, isn’t it, that the Houyhnhnms have no word for “evil.”

Have you read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad? (Here’s an affiliate link to my edition with lots of notes, an introduction, and discussion questions.)

Spoiler alert: at the heart of the darkness narrated in this story is a mad man, one worshipped by the natives in the land he exploits because of the power he holds over them. He is found to have written this chilling statement: “Exterminate all the brutes.”

We’ll finish Gulliver’s Travels next week.

Looking ahead:

After we finish Gulliver’s Travels, we may take a short break (there are a couple of things I want to take some time to write about). But when we resume, here’s what I propose:

Let’s read the play, The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. This will be fun! There are stage and film adaptions of this, as well as an adaptation by Bertolt Brecht called The Threepenny Opera. The play is short and sassy. You can get a Dover Thrift version for a few dollars. I think our more musically inclined readers at The Priory will really enjoy this one! It’s about 60 pages long so we will spend two or three weeks on it.

Then let’s read Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. Copies of this are easy to find. Just look for a reputable publisher (like Penguin).

And we will definitely try to schedule a Zoom or Google hangout, too!

BOOK NOTE:

Speaking of virtues, congratulations to on the release of his new book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times (affiliate link).1 It’s a book that is about the virtues (namely, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and love) and, as the subtitle suggests, considers them in practical application.

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil2

These four chapters are packed—not with action but information, observation, and characterization. So I think the best way to cover this week’s reading is to pull out key qualities we learn about the Houyhnhnms and Gulliver (along with the Europeans he represents). (We’ll learn more about the Yahoos in later chapters.)

About the Houyhnhnms, we learn:

• They do not have books or literature. (This, of course, echoes ancient classical cultures who were characterized by oral tradition.)

• Their language has no words “to express lying or falsehood,” and instead only refer to saying “the thing that was not.” (If you know George Orwell’s 1984—I keep referring to his influence by Swift—then you see where he got the idea for some of the words in Doublespeak.) Gulliver’s “master” (notice the label and its significance) has difficulty understanding “lying and false representation” since “the use of speech was to make us understand one another and to receive information of facts.” (So logical, right?)

• The language of the Houyhnhnms does not have a great variety of words “because their wants and passions are fewer than among us,” Gulliver says. This rationality that lacks passion is important to note and reflect on, as this idea will continue to be developed as the story goes on.

• Speaking of being logical, my edition notes that it was common for logic textbooks of the seventeenth century to define human beings as the “rational animal” and contrast horses, specifically, as an “irrational animal.” So once again, we find Swift using the technique of inversion—taking a common image or metaphor and turning it around in order to let us see things in a new light.

• “Houyhnhnm” in their language means “horse,” and “in its etymology means “the perfection of nature.” (Let’s pause here. We’ve seen in each country Gulliver visits the significance of the words for that land or its people. We’ve also seen the role pride plays. The fact that this race views themselves as the “perfection of nature” should set off some alarm bells …)

There is so much about Gulliver that makes his master and his master’s friends marvel.

• One of the most interesting moves Swift makes in these chapters is in chapter 3, where Gulliver’s clothing is presented in terms that liken it to the story of Adam and Eve being clothed after their fall in Eden. In another quintessentially Swiftian reversal, Gulliver tries to hide the fact that he is clothed (rather than his nakedness) because he realizes that unclothed he even more closely resembles a Yahoo. Furthermore, the implications of Gulliver’s thought that he may have to replace his worn-out clothes with the hides of Yahoos is disturbing.

• When Gulliver’s master does see Gulliver without his clothes, the master observes that Gulliver must be “a perfect Yahoo” despite the differences in body hair and skin color.

• When Gulliver begins to share more of his history with the master Houyhnhnm, the master is incredulous that a Yahoo could do such things as Gulliver claims he and his race have done. He is more shocked to learn how Gulliver’s people treat horses in Europe.

Following the usual pattern in the work, Gulliver spends some time explaining the customs of his homeland to his host. Here he dwells a great deal on war.

• The master Houyhnhnm expresses disbelief that a race represented by the likes of Gulliver could do much harm in battle given the physical weaknesses of Gulliver’s body with a flat face unable to do much biting and short “claws” likewise unable to do much damage. Naturally, Gulliver responds by proudly offering a long catalogue of all the weapons invented by humankind that can do harm. We’ve seen this before, of course, in previous journeys.

• Once again, Swift addresses what he sees as unnecessarily divisive church debates over whether or not “flesh be bread, or bread be flesh” and whether “a certain berry be blood or wine” (references to the doctrines of transubstantiation and consubstantiation in the Roman Catholic church and Church of England, respectively).

• What is new here as Gulliver describes his home country is a long satire on lawyers (an easy target for any satire, of course—with all due respect to my lawyer friends). The particular point of criticism Swift (through Gulliver’s description) emphasizes within the practice is the abuse of language to say that “white is black, and black is white,” in so many ways. Abuse of language, as I’ve mentioned before, is a recurring concern of Swift. It’s not just lying or distorting the truth that is the problem, but using language in such a way that it fails to communicate and obstructs rather than facilitates understanding. This is the problem with the “cant and jargon” Gulliver describes in this same section of chapter 5. (“Cant” is a great 18th century word that basically means “jargon.” Think of the root word in the word “incantation.”)

• In chapter 6, Gulliver offers other objects of Swift’s satire: the place, procurement, and unjust proportionality of money; the love among his people of wine; the existence and treatment of diseases; and the recurring topic of government. These points about Europeans will be picked up again in the context of the Yahoos, so be prepared to note some comparisons. There are so very many objects of Swift’s satire here, about as many as there are sentences or even clauses. One I’m fond of is one of the methods Gulliver describes by which “a man may rise to be Chief Minister” — “by knowing how with prudence to dispose of a wife, daughter, or a sister.” Ouch! Too much truth here.

In these chapters, a continuing picture of Gulliver as a Yahoo and Yahoos as detestable beasts develops.

• The master Houyhnhnm is skeptical that Gulliver has anything more than an appearance of reason.

• Reports circulate around the country that they have been visited by “a wonderful [meaning a real wonder or marvel] Yahoo” that displays some “glimmerings of reason.”

• Gulliver is uneasy about being given “so often the appellation of Yahoo,” an “odious animal for which I had so utter an hatred and contempt.”

• The master is appalled to learn how Houyhnhnms (horses) are treated where Gulliver comes from (although for a short time Gulliver’s description leads him to think the Yahoos there are the servants of the horses, understandably enough—kind of the way I am the servant of my dogs!)

• Note that when Gulliver is explaining all this to his master, he is wise enough to realize that he must do so gently, “with all possible respect” to “himself, his family and friends, and under his promise of not being offended” by the fact that Gulliver’s own people “would hardly think it probable that a Houyhnhnm should be the presiding creature of a nation, and a Yahoo the brute.”

My, how the tables have turned for poor Gulliver …

Reading schedule for the remainder of Part 4:

• chapters 7-9

• chapters 10-12

Looking ahead:

After we finish Gulliver’s Travels, we may take a short break (there are a couple of things I want to take some time to write about). But when we resume, here’s what I propose:

Let’s read the play, The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. This will be fun! There are stage and film adaptions of this, as well as an adaptation by Bertolt Brecht called The Threepenny Opera. The play is short and sassy. You can get a Dover Thrift version for a few dollars. I think our more musically inclined readers at The Priory will really enjoy this one! It’s about 60 pages long so we will spend two or three weeks on it.

Then let’s read Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. Copies of this are easy to find. Just look for a reputable publisher (like Penguin).

And we will definitely try to schedule a Zoom or Google hangout, too!

***

Join me this coming Sunday, April 19th, for a live discussion with Lisa Colón DeLay about her recent book, The Way of the Desert Elders: How the Wisdom of Ancient Christians Sustains Us Today. More details here:

Little Spark Stack

Join Karen Swallow Prior and me April 19th

I’m so happy to announce a LIVE Event with special guest, co-host, and conversation partner Karen Swallow Prior…

Read more

12 days ago · 2 likes · Lisa Colón DeLay | SparkMyMuse

***

Study with me at Bethel Seminary’s Seminary for Everyone!

Here’s a video of yours truly sharing about this course which will be held in June:

And here is more information in this link (scroll down on this page).

Register now and get a discount of $45 off with the discount code SEM45.

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil1

I’m glad that many of Trump’s supporters are calling out the image he posted last night on Truth Social that depicts him as Jesus in the role of healing a sick man.

All over social media, many of his supporters are (rightly) calling this image blasphemous, begging him to take it down, and seeking an apology.

It’s interesting that of all the vile words the president has spoken and of all the actions that have usurped various authorities and transgressed both sacred standards and civil norms, it was an IMAGE that crossed the line for so many.

This image is, of course, just one more in an endless succession of such posted by the president’s social media accounts and official accounts of the U. S. government. Kitsch like this is not morally neutral. Kitsch, Milan Kundera famously explains in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is sentimental indulgence:

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!

The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”

But sentimental indulgence is not mere innocence. Unchecked it becomes a kind of totalitarianism. Kundera explains,

“In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.”

(I have an entire chapter on this in The Evangelical Imagination, by the way.)

To be clear, I am thankful Trump’s supporters and others are speaking up and calling this out for what it is.

Still, it’s telling—given all that media critics like Neil Postman have been telling us for years—that it is an image that has tapped into something so viscerally and unambiguously. As he observed decades ago in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

It is especially interesting to see such a reaction among Protestants, who have historically privileged words over images.

And yet white evangelical Protestants have too often and too inexplicably in recent years used words to rationalize the wickedness of their chosen leader. Blasphemy comes in word, image, and deed.

If it is an image that wakes them up, let it be so.

May it be so.

As the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor famously explains in Mystery and Manners about her own strange stories:

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

May God in his mercy startle us all into truth.

***

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Here’s a taste:

Listen to the rest here:

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It’s exciting to arrive at Gulliver’s fourth and final voyage. No, not because we are weary of this work (I hope!), but because so much culminates in this part. As disjointed and disunified as the whole work does seem at times, this last voyage really could only be the final word on Gulliver—the final word from Swift’s satire on human vice and folly.

If you have read this part before, you likely have never forgotten it. If you haven’t, I can’t wait to hear your response! But if you are re-reading it and know how it ends, I challenge you to read closely. You will surely notice things you didn’t before.

For example, I don’t know how many times I’ve read Gulliver’s Travels, but I noticed this line from the opening paragraph, which I never really paid attention to before, about a passing character of Gulliver’s acquaintance: “He was an honest man, and a good sailor, but a little too positive in his own opinions, which was the cause of his destruction, as it has been with several others.” Again, Swift is reminding us of the destructive power of pride, particularly pride in how much we think we know. It will be our downfall. We ought not to be overly positive in our own opinions.

I mentioned in an earlier post that we should be paying attention to the pattern that develops as Gulliver finds himself separated from his ship in whatever country he ends up in. Here is the pattern:

• He is stranded in Lilliput because of a shipwreck.

• He is stranded in Brobdingnag because his crew runs in fear from the giants.

• He is stranded in Laputa because his ship is overtaken by pirates.

• He is stranded in the country of the Houyhnhnms because his own crew conducts a mutiny against him.

Notice the pattern? The movement is from accidental to increasingly willful and even violent on the part of human beings. The picture of humanity grows darker in this respect with each voyage. Keep that in mind as we read the rest of Part 4.

A couple of vocabulary notes before moving on. The word “Houyhnhnm” is pronounced “whinim” and echoes the sound of a horse’s whinny. The word “Yahoo” is actually one that Swift created! Isn’t that fun? We still use it today in the sense he did in describing an uncivilized, brutish person.

On one level, it’s not hard to get what is happening in this voyage as it goes along: the Yahoos, who sort of resemble goats, are the monstrous brutes in this country, and the Houyhnhnms, who are intelligent and noble horses, are the rational, ruling race. (Elsewhere in his work, Swift describes horses as the “nobler animal” and as “superior beings.” The recognition of horses as exceptionally noble creatures is universal, of course.)

The drama that unfolds in this voyage consists, first, of Gulliver coming to realize how much he resembles a Yahoo. (There’s more, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

Swift sets up this drama expertly as Gulliver encounters the Yahoos first and describes them in terms that are utterly repulsive—to Gulliver and to us. The gritty details—their thick hair, their beards, their lack of tails, their loud roaring, their ability to climb trees (then discharge their excrement on Gulliver’s head)—all help us as readers agree with Gulliver’s assessment: “Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy.”

The footnote in my Norton Critical edition, The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift, explains that the Yahoos are not human but “humanoid.” It further notes that critics have offered numerous models for the Yahoos, who in this fable, represent a non-native species viewed as “savage” by the native race. Possible models include the Irish (whom, as we’ve seen, Swift defended against the English, who often viewed them as “savage”), a class of serfs who lived in ancient Sparta, Presbyterian Scots (whom, apparently, Swift despised), as well as actual simians (the animals) that were described in travel literature of the early modern period (one of the literary genres Gulliver’s Travels parodies).

But let’s back up a bit. Recall that in every place where Gulliver lands, he always describes his first sight of the place, the land, a sight that—through Gulliver’s limited perspective—hints at what he will encounter there. As he arrives in this country, he reports, “The land was divided by long rows of trees, not regularly planted, but naturally growing; there was great plenty of grass, and several fields of oats.” This is quite the pastoral scene. The plenitude of oats makes sense later, upon meeting the horse-people. But even the fact that the crops are “not regularly planted” hints toward what might be an idyllic, Edenic place where agriculture is far from modernized.

When what Gulliver thinks to be a horse approaches, the Yahoos scatter quickly. Yet, the horse is “walking softly.” It’s important to note the demeanor of the Houyhnhnm and the words Gulliver uses to describe him. He looks at Gulliver with “tokens of wonder,” with “a very mild aspect, never offering the least violence.” When Gulliver tries to pet him, he resists “with disdain, shook his head, and bent his brow, softly raising up his left fore-foot to remove my hand.” When another Houyhnhnm arrives, they deliberate together. Gulliver remarks that their behavior is “orderly and rational … acute and judicious.” All in all, the horse-creatures are gentle and genteel.

I love how in most of the voyages, Swift’s realism includes Gulliver’s diet. Food is a universal human concern and always one of the most interesting aspects of travel to a new country. Horses (real ones) are herbivores. So, too, then are Houyhnhnms, which is a problem for Gulliver at first, naturally. But he eventually figures out a diet of milk, bread, herbs, and occasional wildlife. Gulliver notes that with this new diet and lifestyle, he “never had one hour’s sickness” while on this island.

In contrast, the Yahoos eat roots, the rotting flesh of asses and dogs, and that of cows that have died by accident or disease. (Remember the mad cow disease crisis? Swift was really a prophet!) For Europeans (of Swift’s time and ours), this sort of meat is repulsive and taboo.

The idyllic, pastoral nature of life for the Houyhnhnms is further seen in their domestic life which is marked by civility, decency, regularity, and modesty. Hints of a prelapsarian world (before the Fall) are offered in the puzzlement of the Houyhnhnms over Gulliver’s clothing, in particular, the gloves he wears over his “forefeet.”

It’s important to note—it’s the most developed detail in these first two chapters—that Gulliver’s hatred of the Yahoos intensifies with increased exposure to them even as the Houyhnhnms keep seeing similarities between them and Gulliver …

Reading schedule for the remainder of Part 4:

• chapters 3-6

• chapters 7-9

• chapters 10-12

Let’s continue discussing our next read. So far, Moll Flanders seems to be a go! And I think one or two plays would be fun.

Also, let me know if you’d like to try another Zoom meet-up, perhaps when we finish Gulliver’s Travels!

***
I had the honor and pleasure of speaking last week in chapel at Beeson Divinity School at Samford University. The topic was John the Poet-Apostle. The highlight of the service, however, was an outstanding performance by the choir—simply stunning. You can watch or listen to the whole service here.

BOOK NOTE:

Two titles have appeared recently in my mailbox that align well with this week’s reading.

First. since much of Gulliver’s last voyage has him wrestling with what it means to be human, is this book by Marty Solomon (with Reed Dent): The Gospel of Being Human: How Asking Better Questions of the Bible Reveals Who We Are which releases today. I read the manuscript of this book and endorsed it. It is such a refreshing and encouraging examination of timeless questions. You can get a taste of Marty’s work on his YouTube channel.

Second, much of Gulliver’s experience is that of “desert experience.” This book by Noel Forlini Burt—whom I had the pleasure of meeting last week while I was speaking at Beeson Divinity School—picks up on that theme. God in the Desert: A Spiritual Theology of Wilderness in the Old Testament releases next week, but you can pre-order it now.

I may earn a small commission for qualifying purchases made through these links. It’s one more way to support my work. Thank you!

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil1

In the beginning, it was not good.

That first “Good Friday” was not good at all.

Indeed, it was terrible, tragic, horrible, devastating, and dark.

Eerily dark for three hours in the midday.

Only later—three days later, perhaps, but really, much longer for the truth to really sink in, and it is still sinking in—could the goodness be seen. It was much longer, some sources say, before the name “Good Friday” was used to describe the good, hard, awful, agonizing events of that day. Only in hindsight. Only with the slow dawning of understanding.

And revelation.

When we are in the midst of unexpected, prolonged darkness and pain, it is impossible to see the good that might come on the other side.

I say might because, to be sure, not all pain and suffering leads to good things.

Would that it were so.

But sometimes (I don’t know why—I suppose because we are foolish, fallen, finite creatures), the only way to the good is through the darkness.

Sometimes (precisely because we are foolish, fallen, finite creatures), we are so accustomed to darkness we don’t even know it is darkness.

Until we see the light.

And only then can we see at last what is good—really, really good.

The goodness that came from that Friday is freedom: “It is for freedom Christ has set us free,” Paul writes in Galatians 5:1.

I have learned a new definition of freedom for myself, and it is this:

Freedom is not being useful for anyone’s agenda.

Sometimes we don’t know we are bound until we are free, really free.

It was a Good Friday indeed.

Whatever darkness you may be in, keep looking for the light. It’s there on the other side.

We are now completing voyage 3 of Gulliver’s Travels. One more to go!

Before we get to this week’s reading, I wanted to share with you that I wrote an essay on Swift and Gulliver’s Travels last week for my column at Religion News Service. It was prompted by the introduction of a humanoid robotic teacher named Plato. You can’t make these things up! And this one just wrote itself really, since I’ve been immersed in Swift here with you at The Priory. Here’s a link to the whole essay and a brief excerpt:

This week the White House debuted a humanoid robot that walks and talks, and — according to Melania Trump, who introduced the machine — is a prototype for a “teacher” named Plato who will always be “patient and available” in offering the entire corpus of human knowledge in the comfort of your own home.

Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift satirized such chimerical and anti-humanistic applications of human knowledge in “Gulliver’s Travels.” Among the places Gulliver visits is a scientific academy where a giant machine containing the inventor’s entire vocabulary is spun and turned to create phrases and sentences: basically a large language model for its time. Elsewhere in the book, Gulliver witnesses the uses of instruments that kill, rather than heal, their subjects, and encounters a race of creatures who achieve the foolish human goal of immortality, to disastrous results.

Now, back to this week’s regularly scheduled program.

As we’ve noted, this voyage is definitely the one among the “one of these things that is not like the others.” Gulliver goes many places on this voyage and meets many different kinds of people. Whereas the other voyages are more unified in people, places, and themes, this voyage is all over the place, disjointed, patchy, and a bit random. It was the part Swift wrote last, as I’ve mentioned before, and it seems perhaps he was trying to get all his remaining objects of satire in. On the other hand, I think form and function work marvelously well here in that Swift saw in modern ideas a great deal of incoherence and lack of unity. This voyage embodies that mania well. And I think we will see that the last voyage is the most fitting way for the work to end and to bring together all the themes and objects of satire seen throughout.

In these last chapters of Part 3, the two most significant experiences Swift has are in Glubbdubbdrib, the island of Sorcerers, and in Luggnagg, where he encounters the Struldbruggs or Immortals.

When the Governor of Glubbdubbdrib calls forth the spirits of the ancient historical figures for Gulliver to interview, Swift is drawing on a long literary tradition known as Dialogues with the Dead. Dante’s Divine Comedy is perhaps the most famous example of this genre. But we encountered it also in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. In his encounter with the dead, Gulliver learns that many of the things told in history are lies. These lies tend to be of the overly-romanticized kind—overly-romanticized anything is one of Swift’s frequent objects of satire throughout the body of his work. And, of course, the revelation of these lies tends toward the hilarious, as usual. My favorite might be when Gulliver asks for the Kings to be conjured along with all their ancestors for several generations. The ancestors are a band of fiddlers, courtiers, a barber, an abbot, and two Cardinals. You get the joke, right? The supposed royalty born to women in the court were fathered by commoners (and some religious clerics, too). These are the real ancestors, not the “royal” lineage one might expect.

Gulliver further learns that the “prostitute writers” (meaning writers who’ve sold out) who have recorded history have, in fact, tended

… to ascribe the greatest exploits in war, to cowards; the wisest counsel, to fools; sincerity, to flatterers; Roman virtue, to betrayers of their country; piety, to atheists; chastity, to sodomites; truth, to informers: how many innocent and excellent persons had been condemned to death or banishment by the practising of great ministers upon the corruption of judges, and the malice of factions: how many villains had been exalted to the highest places of trust, power, dignity, and profit: how great a share in the motions and events of courts, councils, and senates might be challenged by bawds, whores, pimps, parasites, and buffoons. How low an opinion I had of human wisdom and integrity, when I was truly informed of the springs and motives of great enterprises and revolutions in the world, and of the contemptible accidents to which they owed their success.

Always, always Swift strives to strip us of our illusions, to force us to face the worst truths about ourselves and our humanity, and he begs us not to look away.

The next great illusion Swift forces us to confront is the near-universal wish for immortality. We may not recognize this wish for what it is in the way it manifests today. And if you are a Christian, you may not relate to it much anyway, because we have a different understanding of the immortality that comes with eternal life. But the wish to live forever does underlie many phenomena around us today. There’s the legendary Fountain of Youth of legend. There’s the man who has spent millions on his quest for immortality and calls his project “the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.” There’s the new science of cryogenic freezing that proposes bringing the dead back to life. There’s pet cloning. And then there’s ubiquitous plastic surgery and Mar-a-Lago face. Not all of these examples are direct attempts at human immortality. But they are all refusals to accept aging, the natural effects of aging, and ultimately the end of aging we will all face.

I love how gullible Gulliver is when he thinks about being immortal! Swift is back to using Gulliver as the foolish foil for the reality he is about to throw in front of us through the Struldbruggs. When Gulliver imagines living life knowing he would never die, he has all kinds of visions of what he would do: become wealthy, excel in learning, record history for posterity, mentor and support younger generations, and have a front seat to all the revolutions and discoveries of history.

When he meets the Struldbruggs, however, he discovers a different reality. First of all, the ability to live forever does not stop the aging process, and all that aging does continue, physically, mentally, and personally. (I feel like I can relate to the description of the Struldbruggs growing “opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection.” Hoo boy. I think I’m just tired these days. Hopefully, it’s temporary.) Their memories grow short, the people they know die away, the language changes so much they no longer understand one another (again! I relate!), and their bodies continue to age until they become what Gulliver describes as “the most mortifying sight I ever beheld.”

So cheery.

Swift thought about death and the infirmities of age a lot. He lived a life full of such health infirmities. In 1731 he wrote a poem on his own death, in fact. The poem shows how complex he understood life, death, and one’s legacy to be. In the last lines he imagines what others will say about him upon his dying:

“He knew a hundred pleasant stories
With all the turns of Whigs and Tories:
Was cheerful to his dying day;
And friends would let him have his way.

“He gave the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad;
And show’d by one satiric touch,
No nation wanted it so much.
That kingdom he hath left his debtor,
I wish it soon may have a better.”

Swift did indeed bequeath upon his death funds for the establishment of a psychiatric hospital. This hospital, St. Patrick’s, is still in operation today.

He may have disdained immortality as many understand it, but the legacy of Jonathan Swift lives on.

Next week we will discuss chapters 1 and 2 of Part 4.

Also, looking ahead, if we continue chronologically in our survey of British literature, we have lots of options. We could read some more poetry, we could read prose (like Samuel Johnson’s short philosophical novel Rasselas), we could read Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders would be so fun!). We could read a play … I’d love to hear from you where your energy is. We could also take a break from the survey and read anything outside it! Thoughts? (I continue to have a busy travel season ahead, so my brain and time may be a little short-winded!)

***
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“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil1

Jonathan Swift predicted AI.

It’s right here in chapter 5 of Gulliver’s voyage to Laputa, where he relays his interaction with one of scientists at the Academy of Lagado:

“Perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge, by practical and mechanical operations. But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness; and he flattered himself, that a more noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man’s head. Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” He then led me to the frame, about the sides, whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me “to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.” The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

…

He assured me “that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth; that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech.”

What is this if not a Large Language Model (LLM)?

Of course, this is but one of the experiments Gulliver is witness to. Honestly, this chapter is probably one of the funniest in the entire work—and, as Sheldon Cooper would say, it’s funny because it’s true.

Well, maybe not entirely or literally true. But Swift was satirizing some of the real experiments being done in the Royal Society of London (which was founded in1660 and is today the world’s oldest continuing scientific academy), some of which didn’t seem all that different in degree or kind from the ones Gulliver sees at the Academy of Lagado.

At the Royal Society, air pump experiments and blood transfusions were conducted on living mice, birds, and dogs, even being performed for the public and celebrated in art. Another example from later in the century is the real experiments done by Luigi Aloisio Galvani involving electricity and dead frogs, experiments that inspired Mary Shelley in writing Frankenstein. While Swift was horrified at the cruelty of such experiments (whether conducted on humans or other animals), most Moderns then and now accept it. C. S. Lewis, notably, was one twentieth-century Christian who spoke out against vivisection. The showmanship of the scientists Gulliver talks to at the Academy of Lagado is also rather realistic. Consider this description of nineteenth-century scientists performing for the crowds:

Nineteenth-century air pumps made their home among other scientific instruments used to entertain, including Leyden jars, hydroelectric machines, galvanic piles, and magic lanterns. Large crowds would gather for magic-lantern shows and thrilling electrical displays meant to showcase the power of nature. Scientists of that time were often masterful performers. Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, among others, cultivated their abilities as entertainers, enchanting crowds while increasing their own scientific fame.

But I digress. I was talking about how funny this section is. Swift hilariously mocks experiments that are clearly harmful or go entirely against nature—or both:

• Extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers for later use

• Turning excrement back into food

• Turning ice into gunpowder

• Building houses from the roof down rather than from the foundation up

• Making paint through feeling and smelling rather than seeing color

• Using hogs to plow and fertilize fields (yielding “little or no crop”)

• Making cloth from spider webs

• Marking the turning of the earth by the shifting of the winds

• And (this one seems most closely drawn from real experiments at the Royal Academy): curing indigestion by blowing wind through a bellows into the intestines.

This last is given in excruciating detail, including the death of a dog, a fate Gulliver luckily avoids, but many dogs at the Royal Society did not.

These are but the “practical” scientists. Gulliver next encounters the part of the academy devoted to “speculative learning,” which includes:

• Transforming air into substance

• Softening marble into pillows and pin-cushions

• Petrifying horse hooves on living horses

• Finally, that Large Language Model with which we opened the discussion today.

At the academy’s School of Languages, Gulliver finds a project to turn all words into monosyllabic ones (you can see how George Orwell was so influenced by Swift here), and another project to abolish words altogether by replacing them with the actual things the words (signs) signify. What a preposterous picture Swift paints of people walking around carrying all the things they might want to talk about!

There’s more than humor at work here, however. Gulliver mentions that the above project would have the effect of providing “a universal language to be understood in all civilized nations.” And isn’t this a thing most of us, at one time or another, wish for? Don’t we wish to undo the judgment of Babylon with which God confused human languages?

Be careful what you wish for, Swift seems to be saying, over and over. He will give us another stark warning about this in chapter 10 when we meet another race of people called the Struldbruggs ….

Speaking of that, let’s adjust our reading for the rest of this voyage since the next chapters are rather short. We’ll cover chapters 7-11 next time, so that gives us one more week with Part 3.

There are plenty more projects for Gulliver to see in the Academy of Lagado, however. Next, he visits the school of political projectors where he finds the professors “wholly out of their senses” as they propose that leaders choose their assistants based on “their wisdom, capacity, and virtue,” and teach public servants to “consult the public good” and to reward “merit, great abilities, and eminent service.”

By juxtaposing these clearly good experiments with the ridiculous earlier ones, Swift is observing that these reasonable ways of governing are just as unrealistic as, say, extracting sunshine from a cucumber.

However, not all of the professors in this school are “so visionary,” Gulliver (who is growing wiser) says. But who can discredit the one whose scheme is to take the members of violently opposing political parties, cut off the backs of their heads, and press the two backs together in order to form one moderated skull and brain??? Such a procedure is too tempting today when our two parties won’t even come to an agreement to allow TSA workers to be paid … Perhaps the tax on vice and folly another professor proposes would more than pay their salaries.

You will either love or hate the fact that Swift is at his scatological best in these chapters. Coprology (the study of feces) has a long history and was in fact a subject of fascination in this period of the scientific revolution, as this brief article describes. Swift might take things overboard (as usual) but this is a fact of life and concern for all of us, especially in the beginning and ending stages of our lives. If you’ve been sick or cared for sick or disabled people, the very young or the very old, you know that we can’t always ignore this humble aspect of our humanity. Swift always seeks to strip away all vestiges of human pride.

I laugh every time I read the end of chapter six where a message stating, “Our brother Tom had got the Piles” (an old-fashioned term for hemorrhoids) is deciphered through complicated anagrams decoded in conspiratorial manners to be a warning of a political plot. (Oh, the places we could go with this. I will leave that to you, dear readers!)

As I mentioned above, we will finish Voyage 3 next week!

Then we will move on to the final—and most highly regarded—voyage in Gulliver’s Travels.

TRAVEL NOTE:

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BOOK NOTE:

Congratulations to Jared Stacy (@jaredstacy) for the release of his new book, Reality in Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became an American Evangelical Crisis.1 This was a book I read in manuscript form and endorsed.

I imagine most of our lives are being affected by conspiracy theories in one or more ways. This book will help you understand how and why that is happening.

For those of you not using an edition with illustrations for Gulliver’s Travels, I’m including one of the original illustrations so you can picture the relationship between the flying island of Laputa (where Gulliver is during chapters 1 and 2) and the continent of Balnibarbi underneath it where he spends the next few chapters. (Next, he will go to the metropolis of Lagado in Balnibarbi). The map is yet another of Swift’s many devices that make the travels seem all the more real.

Recall from last week that on the allegorical level, Laputa symbolizes England and Balnibarbi symbolizes Ireland. Thus, when Gulliver describes the oppressive, even murderous, tyranny of the flying island (England) as it hovers over or even smashes into the continent (Ireland), the satire makes horrible sense. Through Gulliver, Swift—a lifelong champion of the Irish nation long subject to England—describes one nation quelling insurrection, rebellion, faction, or refusal to pay taxes through deadly force: making the island hover over the area in question long enough to prevent it from receiving sunlight or rain. If this fails to bring the desired compliance, the island is simply dropped “directly upon their heads.” (The latter, preferably, is avoided lest tall rocks or spires do damage to the bottom of the island.) Thus, to avoid such self-harm to the flying island, the king takes another tack:

Of all this the people are well apprised, and understand how far to carry their obstinacy, where their liberty or property is concerned. And the king, when he is highest provoked, and most determined to press a city to rubbish, orders the island to descend with great gentleness, out of a pretense of tenderness to his people, but, indeed, for fear of breaking the adamantine bottom …

“A pretense of tenderness …” How apt a description of a consummate politician. This relationship between Laputa and Balnibarbi is the primary object of satire in chapter 3, but it’s not the only one.

As he does throughout this voyage, Swift takes lots of satirical jabs at modern science. Most of this chapter consists of some pretty targeted satire of contemporary approaches, expressions, and ideas related to developments in modern “philosophy and astronomy” (as the brief summary introducing this chapter puts it). There are oodles and oodles of critical essays written on this aspect of this voyage alone. For our purposes, let’s just note how detailed and specific the measurements and mechanics of this island are as Gulliver relays them. The idea of a magnetic island (not a flying one) goes back to ancient history and the original source of magnetized ore, an element after which the word “magnet” eventually came (a word history you can read about here).

Swift is skeptical, always, not of scientific knowledge itself, but of the lack of prudence (a word that shows up later in this reading) in its use and application. He also saw through a lot of the smoke and mirrors of scientific jargon and pretense, as seen in a couple of examples in this chapter.

First, in the paragraph that begins by saying, “By this oblique motion, the island is conveyed to different parts of the monarch’s dominions,” Swift parodies the language of scientific formulas hilariously:

To explain the manner of its progress, let A B represent a line drawn across the dominions of Balnibarbi, let the line c d represent the loadstone, of which let d be the repelling end, and c the attracting end, the island being over C; let the stone be placed in the position c d, with its repelling end downwards; then the island will be driven upwards obliquely towards D…

And on and on it goes … It’s hilarious, people. Swift is hilarious.

Then—and this is so subtle, I didn’t notice it at all, but read this insight long ago in an essay by a critic1—Swift parodies the fallacy of circular logic spouted by the learned astronomers:

But it must be observed, that this island cannot move beyond the extent of the dominions below, nor can it rise above the height of four miles. For which the astronomers (who have written large systems concerning the stone) assign the following reason: that the magnetic virtue does not extend beyond the distance of four miles …

In other words, the island cannot rise above four miles because it cannot rise above four miles … get it? As the aforementioned critic points out, Swift is offering a parody similar to one made famous by the French playwright Molière, who, in his 1673 comedy, The Imaginary Invalid, has a character explain that the reason opium induces sleep is because of its relaxing nature (in other words, its sleep-inducing qualities …):

An educated doctor is asking me
the cause and reason why
opium induces sleep.
My answer to that
is because there is in it
a sleep-inducing power
which by its very nature
relaxes the senses.

No wonder Gulliver seeks leave to depart this island and visit the continent below. There he befriends his host, Lord Munodi, who is at this point the only voice of reason Gulliver encounters on this voyage. Munodi, Gulliver says, is “magnificent, regular, and polite.” He exhibits “prudence, quality, and fortune.” Yet, he is outcast by everyone in this place because of his reasonableness, which renders him in this upside-down world as of a “low contemptible understanding.”

Yet, Balnibarbi can be characterized in sum as a place where a lot of effort goes into getting nothing done. This is because, as Lord Munodi explains to Gulliver,

… about forty years ago, certain persons went up to Laputa, either upon business or diversion, and, after five months continuance, came back with a very little smattering in mathematics, but full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region: that these persons, upon their return, began to dislike the management of every thing below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, and mechanics, upon a new foot. To this end, they procured a royal patent for erecting an academy of projectors in Lagado; and the humour prevailed so strongly among the people, that there is not a town of any consequence in the kingdom without such an academy. In these colleges the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments, and tools for all trades and manufactures; whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable as to last for ever without repairing. All the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundred fold more than they do at present; with innumerable other happy proposals. The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair …

All these words simply illustrate the wise aphorism of Swift’s friend Alexander Pope that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”

Friends, it is very dangerous.

I couldn’t help but see this danger—which seems so distant, cerebral, and theoretical when reading eighteenth-century satire—up close and personal in court hearings last week that revealed the way untrained, unknowledgeable young men made decisions to slash government funding and research—funding and research that held actual lives in the balance—based on keyword searches. Keyword searches. When I first saw these video clips, I sent them to friends knowledgeable in these areas to ask if they were real. They are.

These clips seem like they must be satire of the sort only Swift could dream up. But they are not. They are real. They are a travesty.

Science has come a long way since those early years of the Enlightenment that we will see Swift satirizing in next week’s reading. Swift was not opposed to science as we understand it today. (That word wasn’t even used in the way we use it today.) Swift was opposed to people not recognizing the limits of their knowledge and the limits of human understanding. He was opposed to pretense, “projects,” and pride.

When Swift uses the word “project” and describes those who love them as “projectors,” he is satirizing things like abstract speculations, useless knowledge, and wastefulness that work against human flourishing and understanding. This is exactly what Gulliver will encounter in the following chapters as he visits the Academy of Lagado. Buckle up!

Here’s the schedule for the rest of Part 3:

• Chapters 3 and 4

• Chapters 5 and 6

• Chapters 7 and 8

• Chapters 9, 10, and 11

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil2

***

SOME NEWS FROM ME!

After years of going without literary representation (by my choice), I am very excited to announce that I have just been taken on by a literary agent who will be representing my next book! This was a long process in the making (both the partnership and my book proposal), and I am thrilled about this development. I’m not revealing the subject of my next book yet, but I can say that I will return with it to my first love—literature! Stay tuned for more updates as this process moves along!

***

Finally, for your listening pleasure, here’s a recent podcast on Adherent Apologetics discussing You Have a Calling:

Welcome back to Gulliver’s Travels! I’ve missed it more than I expected to during our short break.

As we begin Part 3, I will provide some background to the entirety of this journey.

Readers often find this part to be the one that least fits into the rest of the work. There may be a few reasons for that. First, this voyage includes visits to several different places, as we’ll see, so Gulliver encounters more than one sort of people. That means there is a lot going on in this part, in terms of both the literal plot and the satirical/allegorical elements. (We have a few more chapters, so we will take a bit longer on this voyage to read and discuss. See the schedule below.) Second, this part was the one that Swift wrote last, and because Swift worked on Gulliver’s Travels for several years, Part 3 may have a different tone and method that doesn’t fit as well with the rest. While it was written last, the seeds of this idea go back to Swift’s days with the Scriblerus Club, so these ideas may have been simmering the longest. Readers (and critics) tend to love this part or … not. I’m curious what you will think of it.

Another element that is different is that Gulliver participates less here and acts more as an observer. Indeed, at times it seems he has grown less gullible and wiser as he demonstrates a more critical understanding of the people and practices he encounters here. I will remind you that Gulliver’s Travels is not a novel (the novel had not quite developed yet), so we shouldn’t be looking for the kind of consistent character development we’d expect in the hero of a novel. We can consider, however, the way Swift as satirist uses the voice of Gulliver to critique the objects of the satire.

Speaking of those, let’s clear the way by identifying the places being allegorized in this part: Laputa symbolizes England, Balnibarbi symbolizes Ireland, Glubbdubdrib represents any sentimentalized view of the past, and Luggnagg satirizes the wish for immortality. As we continue reading, the symbolism of the people, the places, and the way they relate to each other will become clearer.

Annotated editions of Gulliver’s Travels explain that the word “la puta” in Spanish means “the whore.” My edition further notes that there is a related Latin word that also means “think.” The entire theme of this voyage might be described as an argument that the life of pure reason—or rationalism—is neither possible nor wise. Recall that this is one of the main ideas in A Modest Proposal—the purely rational man is bound to be led to great evil. Swift was writing in the Age of Reason, and he wrote to remind his peers that reason is not enough. Reason, too, is fallen. Reason, as Martin Luther famously declared, “is the devil’s whore.” Like Luther, Swift was (clearly) not against reason. He was against reason ruling over divine revelation, faith, morality, spirituality, and all that defines us as human beings made in God’s image.

As we look at chapters 1 and 2 of Part 3 of Gulliver’s Travels, let’s discuss the most memorable images and see what Swift is up to here.

First, we have the picture of the Laputians—utterly unforgettable:

Their heads were all reclined, either to the right, or the left; one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to the zenith. Their outward garments were adorned with the figures of suns, moons, and stars; interwoven with those of fiddles, flutes, harps, trumpets, guitars, harpsichords, and many other instruments of music, unknown to us in Europe. I observed, here and there, many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder, fastened like a flail to the end of a stick, which they carried in their hands. In each bladder was a small quantity of dried peas, or little pebbles, as I was afterwards informed. With these bladders, they now and then flapped the mouths and ears of those who stood near them, of which practice I could not then conceive the meaning. It seems the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing …

This is, of course, bizarre. But then if we recall Swift’s technique of literalizing the metaphor, we understand that what we have here are people so caught up in their thoughts (abstract speculations) that they have lost the ability to communicate with other people and have to be brought back to the world and people in front of them through the physical prodding of the flappers. Similarly, with one eye looking upward (toward speculative theory) and one eye “turned inward” (something we call “navel gazing”) they have no eye looking at the reality or the people right in front of them.

Sounds like many of us (myself, too, more often than I’d care to admit) on our smart phones, doesn’t it?

To be clear, Swift wasn’t satirizing something as dumb as smart phones. He was satirizing the truly IMPRESSIVE, GREAT, AMAZING kind of mathematical, philosophical, and scientific reasoning that brought about the Enlightenment itself when that reasoning was exercised apart from our humanity. And that is what we are tempted to ourselves today when we adopt the fruit of all this abstract speculation in ways that diminish or erase our humanity. So maybe Swift was prophetically critiquing our smart phones. And our AI. And so on …

In addition to the appearance of the Laputians and their Flappers, the next most memorable image of this place is the clothing and buildings that are ill-fitting and crooked because they are so caught up in theoretical calculations that they never bother to test or correct these calculations in application. And let’s not forget their food cut into geometrical shapes. (I’m guessing the parents of little ones can relate to this!) Swift paints a detailed, hilarious, and ridiculous picture of this problem which simply comes down to this: the goodness of a theory is only in the goodness of its application.

This is a little outside my wheelhouse (some of you, my readers, will be able to fill in more, I’m sure), but in the classical tradition, the connections between music, mathematics, and astronomy were well studied and understood. Laputa reflects this ancient learning—but with a modern twist in stripping from it its applications to humanity. This is the charge Swift made over and over, lobbed against the hubris he saw among his fellow Moderns who thought their scientific knowledge rendered them superior to the broader humanism of the Ancients.

Speaking of the Ancients, the ideas of a flying island and a place devoted to foolish speculations may be ones Swift borrowed from the Greek playwright and satirist Aristophanes, who portrays similar ideas in his plays, The Birds and The Cloud, respectively.

Finally, I have to mention the most hilarious result of the Laputians’ complete absorption by abstract thinking to the point of being completely absent from the world in front of them. This is the fact that the wives of these men are able to carry on love affairs right in front of their husbands, who are “so wrapped in speculation” that these “familiarities” can be conducted “before his face, if he be but provided with paper and implements, and without a Flapper at his side.” This is followed by a little of what some would say is Swift’s misogyny as Gulliver marvels at the way some of these women will leave the wealth and luxury provided by their husbands on the island in order to go slumming with abusive lovers on the land below. My footnote explains, however, that Swift is alluding to “the infidelity of prime minister Walpole’s first wife” and to another high-profile case of a woman divorcing her husband for a footman. Thus, as the text says, this “may pass with the reader for an European of English story, than for one of a country so remote.” Heh.

One final insight about the reading to this point. Notice with each voyage how Gulliver gets separated from his fellow voyagers. In the first voyage, it was owing to a storm. In the second, he was abandoned when his mates ran in fear from the giants, leaving him behind. In this voyage, he is stranded by the actions of pirates. Notice a pattern? Each abandonment grows more sinister and more intentional on the part of others. Just wait until we get to Part 4 …

Here’s the schedule for the rest of Part 3. Lord willing, this will be for the next several weeks. (I’m in the middle of a very busy speaking schedule and traveling a lot, but I’m hoping I can keep up.)

• Chapters 3 and 4

• Chapters 5 and 6

• Chapters 7 and 8

• Chapters 9, 10, and 11

TAKE A COURSE WITH ME! NEXT COURSE BEGINS MARCH 19:

Once again, I am teaching a course at Inst. for Christian Studies, an offering that is part of the school’s Free to be Faithful program.

This course will be centered on my book, The Evangelical Imagination: How
Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. Readings and discussions will cover Charles Taylor’s definition of social imaginaries and explore central elements of the evangelical social imaginary, including awakening, conversion, testimony,
improvement, sentimentality, and empire. As part of these explorations, the course will consider the metaphorical nature of language, along with the power and limitations metaphors have to communicate truth.

The course offers both credit and non-credit options. We will meet for six weeks, once a week, beginning March 19. Details are here.

Launched by the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS), Free to be Faithful is a program, a resource, and a community, designed to help Christians meet our complex moment. The courses, community, events and more develop believers who are both faithfully Christian and deeply committed to the common good in our divided age.

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil1

I’ve written a handful of times over the years about my infertility and childlessness. But when Christianity Today asked me to write a longer reflection on the subject for their March/April print issue, I realized that it had been a while since I’d done so, and that I’d never written a feature-length article on this subject. I eagerly said yes and spent a few weeks last fall writing, revising, editing—and praying over my words.

I felt the Lord’s grace over my writing, and then when I saw the illustrations in progress, I felt that grace once again. It is a gift as a writer to work with a team—editor, proofreaders, artists, publication. It’s kind of like making a child—it’s a team effort, and there are a lot of ways things can go wrong—and a lot of ways in which God’s grace hovers over and in and through it all, no matter the outcome.

I am giving a bit of an excerpt from my essay here, but I hope you will click on this gift link and read the whole article. Thank you, friends. You, too, a gift of grace when you honor me by reading my words.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the birds and the bees while growing up. I was raised in a rural community as the child and grandchild of farmers. I helped oversee the births of kittens, chickens, rabbits, and one horse. Later, as a college student, I worked at a farm that bred and trained show horses. At times, I was called on to assist in the breeding of mares, the collection of semen from stallions for use in artificial insemination, and the castration of colts. On the farm, we had no doubts about how and when a new life began because we spent so much time trying to facilitate, manage, and control it. The facts of life were all around us every day.

The barn housed one stallion, a stunning steel-gray Arabian. He’d been brought to the farm with hopes he’d sire more progeny from his coveted lineage, but alas, he turned out to be sterile. He didn’t know it though, and whenever a mare was led past his stall, he’d prance about with flared nostrils, arched neck, and flourishing tail. As his past and present owners battled out their legal and financial claims, his fate remained in limbo. Once, I got to exercise him by galloping through the wooded trails that wound around the outskirts of the farm. It was the most exhilarating ride of my life. Like most stallions, he had to be turned out alone and housed in a stall set apart lest he be constantly worked up by the other horses. His was a lonely life.

Like other animals, human beings are subject to nature’s laws. In the realm of mere nature, reproduction is a biological, mechanical, and utilitarian affair. Yet when it comes to human reproduction, so much more than science, biology, and nature are involved. Being made in God’s own likeness and image, humans are more than natural beings. To bear or not to bear a child is a matter that touches on all that it means to be human: not just our biology but also our personal desires, drives, hopes, expectations, and fears—all these wrapped up in our social and familial contexts, traditions, and assumptions.

Again, here’s the link to the rest of the article.

Once again, I am teaching a course at , an offering that is part of the school’s Free to be Faithful program.

This course will be centered on my book, The Evangelical Imagination: How
Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen
Swallow Prior. Readings and discussions will cover Charles Taylor’s
definition of social imaginaries and explore central elements of the
evangelical social imaginary, including awakening, conversion, testimony,
improvement, sentimentality, and empire. As part of these explorations, the
course will consider the metaphorical nature of language, along with the
power and limitations metaphors have to communicate truth.

The course offers both credit and non-credit options. We will meet for six weeks, once a week, beginning March 19. Details are here.

Launched by the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS), Free to be Faithful is a program, a resource, and a community, designed to help Christians meet our complex moment. The courses, community, events and more develop believers who are both faithfully Christian and deeply committed to the common good in our divided age.

I hope you will join us!

So, you want to read more?

Me too, friend. Me too.

Perhaps you are a reluctant or infrequent reader, and you’re thinking you really ought to read more.

Perhaps you are already a voracious reader, yet you realize perhaps that you could and should read even more.

So, let’s do it. Let’s read more.

But let me be clear: I’m not talking only, or even mainly, about quantity of reading. I’m talking primarily about quality: the quality of what we read and how well we read. Let’s face it: most of us are reading a lot these days that neither requires nor encourages deep attention or reflection. Social media posts, emails, text messages, perhaps an article or two: such reading is far too easily skimmed.

So let’s consider reading more texts of higher quality—even if it means reading fewer pages. Let’s read with more attention, more slowly, more immersively, and more thoughtfully. Let’s read more kinds of books—across genres, time and place, cultures, modes, length, style, and even quality. (To be sure, the occasional low-quality book of little literary merit can be good for the soul. The cheap paperback I picked up this summer in an airport store—something about a kidnapping, an attempted murder, a ransom, and a love affair, oh my!—made for great entertainment while I was floating in the pool under the hot sun. I didn’t even care when the book got wet. When it fell apart just as I was finishing it, I simply placed it in the recycling bin. Earth to earth, dust to dust.)

Let me confess at this point, dear reader, that I am writing these words for myself.

I am an avid reader, a professional reader, a constant reader. But I, too, have suffered the effects of diminished attention span, distraction, and general brain fog that is the gift of the Trojan horse of the digital age. As much as I do read, I could and should read more. I could and should read better and read better things.

Here are some ways I’m trying to do this, perhaps some ways you might, too.

1. DON’T LET THE NUMBERS GET YOU DOWN

I’m not a numbers person (math, ugh!) but sometimes the quantitative serves as handmaiden to the qualitative. If you’re addicted to checking your phone constantly (ahem) then perhaps set the timer on it and commit to reading a book until you hear the ding. Some people track the books they read on apps and with that keep a count of titles read. I admit I’m leery of such measures because they tempt the reader more to focus on numbers rather than words, but I’ve heard some folks say that such records can keep them motivated to read more. But numbers do not measure the quality of the texts, the depth of attentiveness given, or the impression made on your mind or soul. As for me, I don’t even know how to count books since I’m always reading a book for fun, several in parts for research, and countless ones I dip in and out of. I read more for absorption than accounting. I read for love not discipline.

Nevertheless, we might consider taking from whatever amount of time we spend daily or weekly on entertainment (streaming movies, bingeing series, scrolling social media, listening to podcasts, gaming, or whatever)—just 15 or 20 or 30 or 60 minutes, perhaps—and give those minutes to a novel, an epic, a memoir, a play, or a poem.

2. ALWAYS CARRY

In contrast to the abstraction of mere numbers is the physicality of the book. Most of the books I read are on the bigger, bulkier side (whether owing to page count, hardcover format, or both), so I have become intentional about keeping handy smaller, lighter works to put in my purse for any extra moments I might have in a waiting room or on the airplane. I still find it too easy to spend those minutes (or I daresay, hours) checking my email or scrolling social media on my phone, but the first step away from that habit is having the alternative readily available. (Poetry is perfect for this purpose!) David Kern, owner of Goldberry Books, wrote an excellent essay, “Books for Everyday Carry,” with more thoughts on this practice. Carrying a book with me wherever I went was something I did without even thinking about it once upon a time before I had a smartphone. Now it’s a matter of relearning old habits.

3. READ IN COMMUNITY

Think about how most of us learned to read—first, by being read to, then by reading under the guidance of a teacher. It’s a good reminder of just how essential the communal aspect of reading is.

When I was an English professor and got paid to read books and discuss them with my students (Callooh! Callay!), it was easy to read a lot. It was literally my (dream) job. And reading was the students’ jobs too. And, oh how we loved the work! (Admittedly, some of them did not love Pamela, but I digress.)

Every now and then I would warn my sweet, innocent students that college is not real life. This is especially true for English majors. Don’t get me wrong. College is, or can be, excellent preparation for real life. But in the real world of work and family, doing the laundry, vacuuming out the minivan, and putting out fires at work, people don’t sit around and read great literature and discuss it thrice weekly. Whether my students believed me or not when I told them so, I don’t know. But I hear now and then from some of them all these years later who tell me how terribly they miss those halcyon days of reading in community. Me too. Me too.

The good news is that the college classroom isn’t the only space where you can find the magic of reading together. Join or start a reading community (aka book club) with friends in living rooms or coffee shops. Such a gathering might be designed to discuss one book in one meeting, which is a fine model. But when reading more difficult, more literary texts such as classical literature, you might opt to take it more slowly and discuss smaller chunks of the text each time. In other words, you can discuss twelve books over twelve months in one year, or you can take a year to discuss one book in a dozen meetings. I’ve led both kinds of book clubs, one at a university bookstore and one at a local coffee shop. The latter took place as part of a series of community events organized by my church, events led by church members but held off the church grounds in order to be more welcoming to the entire community. This was absolutely my favorite way of serving within my church congregation, and it was a spectacular success.

Then COVID hit.

But COVID turned out to be a boon for readers (at least for those who escaped the very real mental stress of the pandemic which made it harder for many to read books).

Now that we’ve all learned to Zoom (even if expeditiously unmuting ourselves continues to be a struggle), countless online book clubs are available. I’m in an incredible one right now that meets weekly to discuss the work of one particular writer and will do so for a limited period of a few months. The participants are from all over the country, but the group is small, each member chosen by the host based on particular but diverse backgrounds and interests. The organizer’s care in selecting the readings, choosing the participants, and leading the discussions has offered a rich experience—and motivated me to read the works of a writer I might not otherwise have ever gotten around to, but needed to.

On an entirely different scale are book podcasts that are open to anyone to listen to at any time yet still offer a way to schedule the reading of the book under discussion and to read along with others. The Close Reads podcast is an excellent example of this approach. 100 Days of Dante offers another way of reading in community through a multi-media experience that offers scheduling flexibility with installments emailed to you according to a schedule of your choosing from among a few options.

With all this said, I will admit that I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts or watch many videos. I don’t join book clubs on a regular basis. I do listen to audio books mainly because there is not enough time otherwise to enjoy all the books I want to read. For me it is reading alone, bound pages in hand, that feeds my introverted soul and soothes these old friends my nerves.

I suppose this is why I was drawn to another online approach to reading in community and have offered that through my own Substack newsletter, The Priory. There, over the past two years, we’ve ambled through Beowulf, parts of The Canterbury Tales, all of Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and many other shorter works. The newsletter format is limited in that it’s impossible to cover closely all of a work, even one as short as a sonnet, in writing. But it is a way to read “together” and to communicate about reading through writing. It has been a delight to cultivate a small reading community this way. And Substack is chock full of other newsletters doing similar book clubs in various formats and modes.

4. READ ALONE

One of the things that draws me to reading is the way it is at its best quiet, solitary, and slow. Even though we learn to read in community and long to share that experience with others, mostly, we read alone. Reading is, ultimately, an individual, private, interior event. That interiority is what makes reading so powerful, so important, so worth doing more and doing better.

In his introduction to the 2006 edition of The Gutenberg Elegies,1 Sven Birkerts defines imagination as “the animating power of inwardness.” Reading literature, Birkerts writes, is no less than “the age-old practice of addressing the world by way of this inward faculty of imagination.” Reading is “a filtering of the complexities of the real through artistic narrative, reflection, and orchestration of verbal imagery.” With the decline of reading, particularly the decline of reading literature and literary fiction, Birkerts says, the imagination itself is at stake. Through reading, the “subjective self takes in the world and fashions meaning: art and religion are its supreme exertions.”

Birkerts’ elegy is for what has been lost of reading first in the electronic, now in the digital, age. I feel this loss profoundly. I am trying to regain it. It’s not as simple as simply withdrawing from the digital world. Few of us have the luxury of living the life of Wendell Berry, a lifestyle that was a lifetime in the making. But perhaps no matter what kind of life we lead we can peel away some of its digital layers by plunging ourselves more deeply into books—good books, physical books—slowly, quietly, thoughtfully. As Birkerts writes, “The soul needs silence, time, and concentration—precisely what is required by the counter-technology of the book.”

Let us read. Let us read more and let us read well for our very souls.

Next week, we’ll pick up our reading of Gulliver’s Travels with the first two chapters of Part 3. It’s not too late to get caught up if you’re behind! Here are some editions of Gulliver’s Travels I’d recommend (if you purchase through any of these links, I may get a small percentage as an Amazon affiliate):

• Norton Critical edition

• Penguin Classics edition

• Everyman’s Library edition

• Penguin Classics paperback edition

Please consider supporting the reading done here by becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Priory.

BOOK GIVEAWAY:

I have an extra (brand new!) copy of the haunting novel Silence by Shusaku Endo that I found while organizing my library and will give away to one paid subscriber! Just write SILENCE in the comments and I will pick one winner to receive this book. It is a challenging but outstanding work, one I wrote about in my chapter on the virtue of hope in On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life in Great Books.

***

Take a course with me!

Do you want to take a graduate course with me? Well, this year you have three opportunities to do so!

I will be returning to Institute for Christian Studies to teach a six-week online course centered on my book, The Evangelical Imagination (affiliate link), beginning in March. Details to come (watch this page).

I will be teaching a similar online course in June (once a week for four weeks) at Bethel Seminary. Details here. (Also, I have a discount code to offer for this course: SEM45)

Also in June, I will be teaching an in-person class at Regent College in Vancouver on Flannery O’Connor. Details here.

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil2

I’m delighted to have a guest post from my dear and longtime friend Marybeth Baggett, writing on a text that greatly informs Gulliver’s Travels: Thomas More’s Utopia. Marybeth Baggett holds a PhD in literature and criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. After teaching English for more than two decades, she is now pursuing a JD at the University of Missouri Law School, along with her husband David. For more on their journey, check out their Substack—Pair O’Docs @ Law School.

We’ll pick up our reading of Gulliver’s Travels in two weeks with Part 3. That will give you time to get caught up or get ahead!

***

Even in this contentious moment, there’s one thing on which we can all agree: Life is not the way it’s supposed to be.

We might disagree of course on what exactly has gone wrong or what should be the fix. But we all know, deep in our bones, from our earliest days, that something has gone terribly wrong. And, by extension, we long to see it set right, to live in a world unsullied by vice or scarcity.

There’s a 500-year-old word that has come to encapsulate this idea—utopia. Coined by 16^th century English statesman Thomas More, Utopia is the eponymous title of his treatise describing a supposedly ideal island where human beings have conquered besetting social sins to establish a model community. It’s a tricky little word (and text), as we’ll discuss in a bit, but at first blush utopia conjures up notions of harmony and abundance. In so doing, More’s conception draws from a deep imaginative well.

Paradisiacal visions of better and even perfect worlds have long flourished in myth and literature alike. The Greek Golden Age, the biblical Eden, the Land of Cockaigne, for example, all describe a life free from want or worry, a land overflowing with bounty and provision, a people devoid of strife and division. These are mostly imaginary places, vividly descriptive yet steeped in the mystical and otherworldly: eternal spring, soil without thorns or thistles, roasted birds flying into people’s mouths. These conditions may stir strong yearnings, but mere mortals could never actually achieve them through human means alone.

Separate from these fanciful scenarios, writers through the ages have repeatedly explored central questions of justice and have attempted to articulate the circumstances necessary for its realization. Plato’s Republic is a seminal text along these lines. Like the fantastical myths, Republic depicts a flourishing human community, but in the philosopher’s rendering, rationality and discipline are key to minimizing society’s flaws. Another distinction is that Plato’s Republic is cerebral and abstract, almost intentionally resisting the concrete or visceral. It’s more complex thought experiment than fully-formed social blueprint. Readers of Republic can and have certainly applied Plato’s insights to real-world situations, but the text itself is not programmatic in the way More’s transformation of this material—and simultaneous inauguration of a new genre—would be.

Published in 1516, Utopia is a book in two parts. It’s most known for the second part. There, More—through his worldly-wise spokesman Raphael Hythloday—lays out what appears to be a detailed blueprint for the perfect state, one based on thoroughly modern notions of cooperation, egalitarianism, reason, and liberalism, a marked contrast from its mythological precursors. The difference might be accounted for by the age in which More wrote. The Renaissance—More’s era—was marked by a revival of classical philosophy and literature, a widespread embrace and promotion of humanism, elevation of the individual, and paradigm-shifting discoveries in technology, science, and global exploration.

More brings these Renaissance ideals to bear on the perennial human desire for a prosperous community, where people live at peace and all have their due. Drawing particularly on the popular exploration narratives of the time, More’s framing suggests that Utopia is an actual only-just-discovered land. Hythloday himself is one of those explorers, and his report from this land is ostensibly based on his firsthand experience there.

This mapping of Utopia onto the popular discovery travelogues of his time is a way for More to realistically ground this vision of the good life for a modern world. Through routine and well-ordered social and government structures, denizens of More’s literary experiment are free to improve themselves mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. And working toward the good is at the heart of their communal project. All social spheres go in for the Utopian treatment: Government, Education, Family, the Arts, Economy, Leisure, Religion. Regulation is the name of the game. The Utopians’ lives are thoroughly planned—their time, their studies, their political practice, their domestic lives, their faith, and more. In this way, More projects the appearance of a workable solution to society’s ills, a fully realized state that accounts for human foibles and puts into practice—through reason, ingenuity, and old-fashioned hard work—the ideals only dreamed about in earlier works.

In More’s imagination, this well-functioning community is depicted as seemingly achievable and has supposedly been achieved in the land of Utopia where citizens live in harmony, working toward the common good without materialistic trappings. Earlier blissful visions presumed inherent human goodness, perhaps instilled by an ideal, somewhat Epicurean, environment where human beings rested content with physical gratification. On the other hand, More’s mouthpiece Hythloday suggests that social engineering can do the trick and recounts how the Utopians have traced through the causes and effects of a more perfect life. At least that’s the idea according to Hythloday, and thus the utopian literature that followed in Utopia’s wake insists on human solutions to human problems.

Read this way, More’s work is fairly straightforward—a literary work that posits the means by which a world so off-kilter can be set right: a people that submits perennial human and social problems to rational and practical examination, seeking out the best solutions. That’s how the literary genre spawned by the work has taken his project, adopting and adapting More’s concerns and solutions to human ills of their present time and place. More than 1,500 such works have been published in English.[1]

More’s progeny becomes larger still when considering the ways writers have pushed back against More’s apparently positive depictions, rendering Utopia in contrast and highlighting the despotic tendencies inherent to such totalizing systems. Notable examples include Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Fahrenheit 451. These dystopian works, as they were ultimately called, ramped up in the twentieth century as modern warfare made it increasingly difficult to believe that human ingenuity and rationalization were wholly positive forces. There’s a strong argument to be made that all utopias are dystopias in negative. That is to say, each person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

On closer examination of More’s book, one realizes that the writer anticipated those concerns. It’s notoriously difficult to make sense of. Susan Bruce calls Utopia “the most slippery of texts,” insisting that “in no other literary work is the question of authorial intention at once more pressing and more unanswerable.”[2] The title alone clues us in to More’s ambiguous intentions. Topia comes from the Greek topos, meaning place. The U prefix tacked on hints at a Latinization of the word, but in so doing, it collapses the Greek “ou” (no) and “eu” (good) into a compact literary puzzle, a pun packed with fruitful significance.

In general parlance, the “good place” version of Utopia has overshadowed the “no place” reading. Yet to appreciate fully More’s purpose, the reader must hold those meanings in tension, for each contributes to the questions he is posing to his reader, questions such as the following:

• Does Utopia exist?

• Can it exist?

• Is its existence desirable?

• What life is desirable?

• Can a place make life better for its inhabitants?

• What role does the individual have in creating that place?

Rather than answer these questions, the book invites readers to wrestle with the challenges themselves. In fact, I suspect this interpretive project is the book’s real purpose. More has presented us with a literary sleight of hand—a riddle packed inside a disquisition.

Cracking the code requires stepping back to consider the book as a whole. As a setup for the Utopian social experiment of the second half, the first book of Utopia recounts More’s time in Antwerp while serving as envoy for Henry VIII. More writes of himself in third person, as though he were simply another character in the text. Other characters introduced are his friend Peter Giles and the aforementioned Hythloday, a traveler and explorer come back to Europe with extraordinary tales of other worlds and critiques aplenty of European civilization. More’s diplomatic task coupled with Hythloday’s bombast convince both More and Giles that the traveler would be well-suited to serve a royal court as advisor. This belief creates the guiding narrative of Utopia’s first book, centered on their attempt to press Hythloday into public service. Yet, despite his many criticisms of European civilization and his self-reported grasp of alternative modes of social existence, Hythloday is inconvincible.

Serving a king is bondage, he says. It is also useless, for Hythloday conceives of kings as tyrants, their court as flatterers, and their laws as provincial. Beneficial change can never occur, Hythloday concludes, so he avoids the attempt, all the while feeling free to criticize European society with impunity and pontificating about Utopia with authority. He stands quite indifferently apart from both Europe, the society he criticizes, and Utopia, the society he promotes, making him a less than admirable character and rendering his promotion of Utopian ideals and structure questionable at best.

Primarily because of the striking and comical contrast between Hythloday’s public presentation of himself as purveyor of knowledge and his ultimate disdain of More’s public service concerns, I agree with Robert Elliott who says that Utopia is to be read as satire, an approach that insists on careful attention to More’s work on its own terms. Elliott suggests we can best understand More’s project by testing the voices of Utopia’s speakers “against the norms of the work, weighing each shift of tone for possible moral implication. The meaning of the work as a whole is a function of the way those voices work with and against each other: a function of the pattern they form.”[3]

When taken in full, the book becomes not a manual for a new and better world but a call for taking moral responsibility for the worlds we make and a sober reminder that this world making is dynamic, ongoing, always in process. The book itself is full of literary wordplay that reinforces this notion. Besides his contradictory title, More includes other elements in his work that undermine a straightforward reading. One quick example among many: though Hythloday is the expounder of the wonders of utopian life, his name translated from Greek means “speaker of nonsense.” And would More himself, a devote Catholic, truly be advocating that euthanasia be an acceptable element of an ideal society?

In fact, when judged against the liveliness of the first book and More’s descriptions of his own family life, we realize that there is something eerily inhuman about the island Utopia—so ordered, so clinical, so controlled. What human can possibly survive there? Harry Berger calls these Utopians “walking statues confined in a carefully carpentered world of labyrinthine rationalizations and fortified institutions.”[4] Berger argues that the rigidity of Utopian society reveals the misanthropy at the heart of its project and uses the Utopian family structure as his key example, particularly as compared with the family of Thomas More described in his prefatory letter. While on the surface Utopian society seems to value the family, their elimination of any personal or private space also dissolves family ties. Utopian families are subsumed in the larger social project through communal meals, childrearing, caretaking, and housing. Thus, while Hythloday overtly praises the Utopian family, it is simultaneously undermined, a feature of Utopian society Berger identifies as “misanthropic self-deception.”[5]

Ultimately, Utopia has codified a contingency that obliterates the self, a connection that belies the actual disconnection and dissolution of the individual. And Hythloday is chief among the self-deceivers. For example, Hythloday denounces owning private property as the besetting human sin and praises its abolishment in Utopia as the panacea for all social ills, yet Hythloday’s own account of Utopia reveals that lawbreaking still exists—thievery, fornication, deceit. None of these has been eradicated by the imposed program. And, again, Hythloday seems unaware of his contradictions. Such tensions underscore that the greed, pride, and self-concern More attacks in Book I are not the burdens only of the aristocrat, but also of every person, including his reader who, without careful attention, can easily be tempted, along with Hythloday, to misread the Utopian existence as one-dimensional and, thus, wholly perfect.

But, contrary to popular understanding, Utopia is not a program for social reform, not in any detailed way, anyway, but rather it is a call for self-examination.

In the end, neither Hythloday, the disengaged, self-consumed individualist, nor the Utopians, a regimented and mechanical collective, are preferable to More’s moderate approach where he navigates his way through the world, asserting his determined self (contra the Utopians) while participating in a larger culture (contra Hythloday). Notably, in so doing, More is guided by principles rather than preset, rigid rules.

The author and his fictional counterpart seek a correspondence between individual moral requirements and the good of community, a recognition that what is in one’s self-interest is to live in harmony with one another. At root, Utopia is a paradoxical call for the individual to sacrifice for the group and the group for the individual, but not ever for either to be sacrificed for the other. Both approaches might turn on the same word—sacrifice. But there’s a world of difference between them, as wide apart as cruelty and kindness, inhumanity and humanity, dystopia and utopia.

Despite Hythloday’s protestations to the contrary, there is no way to programmatize these heart attitudes. We cannot systematize our way out of trouble. In that sense, it’s very much a book for our times. Like the fictional More and Giles, we might find ourselves eager for someone like Hythloday to regale us with stories of a well-functioning republic and to share with us the simple secret for getting there. We, too, might be lulled into thinking there’s a system that can fix our ills without multiplying harm or demanding too much of us. But as the island Utopia intimates, regimentation can quickly overshadow the human. And as Hythloday embodies, trusting a structural solution alone can inculcate complacency, self-indulgence, and pride.

So what then? If Utopia doesn’t offer us concrete answers, what good is it? Why continue to read it? The answer lies precisely in the frustrations the book surfaces. There’s a wealth of insight to be gained from the complications of life that it reveals and especially in the temptations toward domination and control within us that it draws out.

As we make our way through More’s text, it presses us to consider what we are really and truly willing to do—for better or worse—to achieve the good life and whether those impulses are resonant with an actual good life. It’s an uncomfortable question, one that won’t let us off the hook easily. But it’s oh, so crucial to ask. After all, what profit is there, if we gain a utopia and yet lose our soul?

(Affiliate link: I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases made through these links.)

[1] Wikipedia offers a nice rundown of some of the most popular of these texts (though they bring together anything in the utopian vicinity, including critical utopias): “List of Utopian Literature”

[2] Bruce, Susan. Introduction. Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, and the Isle of Pines, edited by Susan Bruce, Oxford UP, 2008, p. xix.

[3] Elliott, Robert C. “The Shape of Utopia.” ELH 30/4 (1963), pp. 321-22.

[4] Berger, Harry. “Utopian Folly: Erasmus and More on the Perils of Misanthropy.” English Literary Renaissance 12/3 (1982), p. 279.

[5] Ibid., p. 271.

[Update: I wrote this very late last night, unable to sleep after drinking too much Diet Dr. Pepper at dinner. I know that blasted caffeine high too well, and I am alas too old for it! I tried to lull myself to sleep by reading some Mary Oliver poems, but that only agitated me, so I decided to write my own poem. It’s one I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually. With some of your comments, I’m tweaking some things here and there, including the line format. The original is below this revised version. It’s fun to share a work-in-progress with readers of the The Priory! Thank you!]

We had been co-workers, co-laborers
for the gospel (as they say in that particular language).

More, we had been friends,
friends, at least,
in the sense of my own language,
the normal one.

But, as it turned out, we spoke different languages.
We stood on different grounds.

Moreover, it was a friendship moored,
according to all that played out,
on different things, some outside our control, moored
not on mutual trust within our control but, as it turns out,
on trust that runs only one way,
on language we thought was shared,
but was not after all.

We were on different grounds all along, I suppose.

The worst thing I fear,
I said to him,
when the truth of the situation became clear,
the truth that nothing would ever be the same again
because of someone’s abuse and betrayal,
is losing our friendship.

That will never happen, he insisted.

And that was the last time we spoke.

Until years later, at a funeral.
The funeral marked a death
that took a long time to come, a death
years in the making, years rooted
in the languages none of us had in common
and the beliefs we thought we shared but
tragically did not.
A death tragically years in the cementing,
nevertheless, still…
…shockingly far too soon.

Our mutual grief was expressed and understood
through a mixture of the old language and the new.

But nothing added up, not even the bill of the cab
we shared back to the airport.
Neither language nor death can adequately express
the concept of a true friend, after all.

The worst thing I fear,
I said to him, again,
is losing our friendship because of all that has happened here,
all that led to this other death, too.

That will never happen, he said again.

And this time that was the last time we spoke.

***

ORIGINAL:
We had been co-workers, co-laborers for the gospel (as they say in that particular language).
More, we had been friends, friends, at least, in the sense of my own language, the
normal one.
But, as it turned out, we spoke different languages. We were on different teams.
Moreover, it was a friendship built, according to all that played out, on so many things
both outside our control, and upon the mutual trust within our control but, as it turns out, ran only one way, on the basis of language we thought was shared but was not after all.

We had been on different teams all along, I suppose.

The worst thing I fear, I said to him, when the truth of the situation became clear, the truth that nothing would ever be the same again because of someone’s abuse and betrayal, is losing our friendship.

That will never happen, he insisted.

And that was the last time we spoke.

"Until years later, at a funeral.
The funeral service marked a death that took a long time to come, a death years in the

making, years rooted in the languages we didn’t have in common and the beliefs we thought we shared but tragically did not. A death tragically years in the cementing.

Nevertheless, it was still…

…Shockingly far too soon.

Our mutual grief was expressed and understood through a mixture of the old language and the new. Nothing added up, not even the bill of the cab we shared back to the airport. Neither language nor death can adequately express the concept of a true “friend,” after all.

The worst thing I fear, I said to him, again, is losing our friendship because of all that has happened here, all that led to this other death, too.

That will never happen, he said again.

And that really was the last time we spoke.

****

I hope this little prose-poem made sense and even more importantly made some sense of things in your own life as the world increasingly, sadly divides and polarizes. These words reflect a bit of the personal trauma I’ve been through, trauma for which this space at The Priory has offered healing and hope, and for which Im deeply grateful. I hope you are, too. Reading, “liking,” sharing,” and upgrading to paid subscriptions (or buying them for your friends) all assure me that I’m offering something of value to the world that is worth my time and investment, that we speak the same language. Thank you for supporting my work here in any and all of these ways. They matter. You matter.

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” – Jonathan Swift in Thoughts on Various Subjects

Chapter 7 of the voyage to Brobdingnag gets rather utopian. Here the satire gets more straightforward, and we can understand much of Gulliver’s criticism of Brobdingnag and its king to be qualities that Swift is actually praising. Let’s go through some of these points.

With a critical but generous spirit, Gulliver says that

… great allowances should be given to a king, who lives wholly secluded from the rest of the world, and must therefore be altogether unacquainted with the manners and customs that most prevail in other nations: the want of which knowledge will ever produce many prejudices, and a certain narrowness of thinking, from which we, and the politer countries of Europe, are wholly exempted. And it would be hard indeed, if so remote a prince’s notions of virtue and vice were to be offered as a standard for all mankind.

Swift certainly does not believe, as Gulliver does, that European countries are wholly exempted from prejudice and narrowness of thinking! Moreover, Swift is actually satirizing the notion that “a certain narrowness of thinking” is bad. Swift is disputing the idea that virtue and vice are determined by popular consensus rather than by self-evidence regardless of mass appeal. It’s helpful to note that in his non-satirical work, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Swift likens “weeding out prejudices” to the desire to “eradicate religion” itself.

To reinforce this interpretation that Swift’s satire here depends on direct irony (in other words, that Swift’s meaning is exactly opposite that which Gulliver says), we can observe what follows next: Gulliver’s boastful praise of the invention and use of gunpowder, and his offer to tell the king the method of making it. But the king is “struck with horror” at Gulliver’s description and his proposal. The king “protested, that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or in nature, yet he would rather lose half his kingdom, than be privy to such a secret; which he commanded me, as I valued any life, never to mention any more.”

What is Gulliver’s response to the king’s objection to the making and use of such weapons? He says,

A strange effect of narrow principles and views! that a prince possessed of every quality which procures veneration, love, and esteem; of strong parts, great wisdom, and profound learning, endowed with admirable talents, and almost adored by his subjects, should, from a nice, unnecessary scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no conception, let slip an opportunity put into his hands that would have made him absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of his people!

Gulliver cannot believe such a wise king would refuse such power. Swift, of course, wants us to see this as pure folly.

Here are some other follies voiced by Gulliver in this chapter as he critiques the king (followed by my brief explanation of Swift’s actual views):

• “I take this defect among them to have risen from their ignorance, by not having hitherto reduced politics into a science, as the more acute wits of Europe have done.” (Swift, a great humanist, thought reducing our humanity to mere “science” was absurd. This will actually be the topic of the third and next voyage.)

• “The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in morality, history, poetry, and mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture, and all mechanical arts; so that among us, it would be little esteemed.” (What Gulliver views as “defective” learning is what Swift would see as ideal.)

• “And as to ideas, entities, abstractions, and transcendentals, I could never drive the least conception into their heads.” (Swift believed something was good only inasmuch as it could be applied to life—again, a theme that will be strong in the next voyage.)

• Their laws “are expressed in the most plain and simple terms, wherein those people are not mercurial enough to discover above one interpretation: and to write a comment upon any law, is a capital crime. As to the decision of civil causes, or proceedings against criminals, their precedents are so few, that they have little reason to boast of any extraordinary skill in either.” (Swift believed that laws and the language expressing them should be clear and plain and consist of common sense. What say the lawyers here among my readers?)

• Their writing “style is clear, masculine, and smooth, but not florid; for they avoid nothing more than multiplying unnecessary words, or using various expressions.” (Again, because Swift believed the purpose of language is to communicate, writing should be clear. In his “Letter to a Young Clergyman,” Swift’s advice on writing a sermon includes this principle: “The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.”

In these respects, and more, Brobdingnag is a close-to-ideal society. More on that in a bit.

Gulliver then goes on to see some commonalities between his own race and the Brobdingnagians, including, as he sees from reading one of Glumdalclitch’s books, the habit of all people everywhere of “drawing lectures in morality, or indeed rather matter of discontent and repining, from the quarrels we raise with nature. And I believe, upon a strict inquiry, those quarrels might be shown as ill-grounded among us as they are among that people.” In other words, people everywhere find something to be discontented about.

We get in this and the following chapter more delightful aspects of Gulliver’s distorted perceptions based on his small size. He cannot really “see” the glories of the military exercises of the giant race because of their immense size and spectacle, for example. A special treat for readers is the description of Gulliver running across the rungs of a ladder to read, one line at a time, a giant page of the giant books in the king’s library.

As always, Gulliver grows restless again. Besides, despite all that is good here, including the king, queen, and little Glumdalclitch, Gulliver detests the king’s idea of finding him a mate so they can breed:

“I think I should rather have died than undergone the disgrace of leaving a posterity to be kept in cages, like tame canary-birds, and perhaps, in time, sold about the kingdom, to persons of quality, for curiosities. I was indeed treated with much kindness: I was the favourite of a great king and queen, and the delight of the whole court; but it was upon such a foot as ill became the dignity of humankind.”

Note that Gulliver states that he was “treated with much kindness” –- despite being considered a kind of little animal, which makes some sense given the circumstances.

Here we return to Swift’s technique of literalizing the metaphor. Despite their imperfections, the Brobdingnagians—the great, big people—are big-hearted. This is in contrast to the Lilliputians—the tiny people—who are small: small-hearted and narrow-minded. Swift gives us literally big people who are metaphorically big and literally small people who are metaphorically small. It’s so simple, it’s ingenious.

I love the way Swift gives so many “realistic” details of his getaway—his box being snatched by a bird, the same handles used to belt the box on his journeys being used by the ship to haul him in, and all the souvenirs he keeps and shows as evidence of the land he’s been in.

And finally, that change in perspective that is so hard to shed: Gulliver returns to people his own size thinking they are miniature. He thinks himself so big in relation to his home that he ducks his head so as not to hit it when going through the door. It reminds me of the first couple of times I returned to America after being in Great Britain and being awestruck at how large everything here is—refrigerators, cars, and homes. How easily we assimilate and then re-assimilate.

How easily we adopt the perspective of those around us.

***

Readers, we are halfway through Gulliver’s Travels! What a delightful journey it has been! If you have been enjoying Swift, there are more works, including shorter ones, I could cover next, if you are interested. Leave a comment either way!

Next week, we will have a guest essay on Thomas More’s Utopia, a foundational work in the genre of which Gulliver’s Travels is part. Here is a print edition (affiliate link) and here is an online version.

Take a course with me!

Do you want to take a graduate course with me? Well, this year you have three opportunities to do so!

I will be returning to Institute for Christian Studies to teach a six-week online course centered on my book, The Evangelical Imagination (affiliate link), beginning in March. Details to come (watch this page).

I will be teaching a similar online course in June (once a week for four weeks) at Bethel Seminary. Details here. (Also, I have a discount code to offer for this course: SEM45)

Also in June, I will be teaching an in-person class at Regent College in Vancouver on Flannery O’Connor. Details here.

BOOK GIVEAWAY:

My friend has written an important book, one she devoted much research, time, and life experience to produce. That book is For the Love of Women: Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in America (affiliate link).

Here’s the thing about this book: Dorothy is not an alarmist, dramatist, or polemicist. She is sober, reasonable, and balanced. She digs deep and thinks deeply. She writes quiet, sound books that are important and helpful—but don’t get a lot of buzz or attention. (Kind of like mine, to be honest.) It’s hard to write and sell “unsexy” books. I’m giving away two signed copies of this book to two paid subscribers (U. S. addresses only). Simply comment FOR THE LOVE OF WOMEN in the comments and I will pick two winners at week’s end. I’m hoping some others will see this book and buy a copy — or a few. We all need to read it: women, men, pastors, lay leaders, teachers, humans. (I know because I read and endorsed it!)

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil1

I’M COMING TO MISSISSIPPI COLLEGE NEXT WEEK:

Come see me if you are near. Details:

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

I’ve been around here at Substack long enough to have a lot of posts some of you might have missed. I’ll post one from time to time to revisit if you like or read for the first time. Click on the image to go to an interview I did last year with Minnesota Public Radio. (Note: the link on the graphic isn’t working. Click here instead.)

Sorry to flood your inbox this week, friends! I’ve been writing up a storm in preparation for a very busy travel/speaking schedule this spring. And sometimes things I’ve been working on for weeks all get published around the same time!

So, here is another new essay, published this week at Religion News Service (or an excerpt anyway). This is an essay I figured would make me some friends and some enemies alike. But I hope even where we disagree, we can all respect at least the attempt to be consistent and to uphold human dignity the best we know how.:

“What radicalized you?”

If you spend any time on the internet, you’re likely to encounter this viral question, usually offered or answered in the context of some political or social issue on either side of the ideological aisle.

I was radicalized by the religious right.

A young adult in the 1980s, I was raised in a Christian home and was — and am — a Christian myself. But even as a young adult, I didn’t understand the churches I attended to be fundamentalist or conservative or any such label. We were “Bible-believing” congregations that embraced the inspiration and authority of God’s word, a view I still hold. In those days I lived largely outside evangelical Christian culture and the rising moral majority movement.

Until, one day, I was radicalized after being introduced at my church to the pro-life position on abortion. The abortion issue — brought to me, not by the Catholic Church, which had long stood against it, nor by the pacifist or radical feminists who also opposed abortion for generations, but by the religious right — changed me.

This isn’t where the story ends. Read the rest here (no paywall, no subscription needed).

Swift offers his most blistering satire yet in this week’s reading. We’ll get to that.

First, we get more of Gulliver’s misadventures, the first batch funny (but truly dangerous) as Gulliver is beset by apples, hail, a dog, and a vicious bird. And all this is followed later by more shenanigans with a frog and a monkey.

The next ordeal he has probably made you uncomfortable, gentle reader. This adventure involves Gulliver being brought into the apartments of the maids of honor (there’s some irony) where they take no care before him in various stages of undress. We get the usual horror from Gulliver as he experiences the human body in gargantuan form, with all the smells thereof and the magnified view of skin, hair, moles, and whatnot. What is worse is that the dishonorable maids treat Gulliver very much like a toy for their own pleasure and amusement. They use him, as Gulliver himself says, “without any manner of ceremony, like a creature who had no sort of consequence.” And that’s just it. Gulliver is treated as entirely inconsequential, sexually and otherwise. He is utterly dehumanized. Notably, he stands up for himself by managing to avoid further visits there with Glumdalclitch’s help. His shame and reluctance to relay more details of this experience is a significant note of psychological realism.

This dehumanization continues later in the chapter when Gulliver is seized by a monkey who treats him as though he is her baby, another event that isn’t just physically traumatizing but emotionally as well. (Note: It’s beyond ironic that this reading takes place within days of a national scandal involving the portrayal of our former president and first lady being dehumanized in being depicted by our current president’s social media account as simian creatures. How timeless this work of Swift is!) To be treated by an animal as though you are of the same kind, as Gulliver is here, is another form of dehumanization. We will encounter this phenomenon again in Gulliver’s fourth voyage.

It’s interesting that the very next “adventure” that follows the one with the maids of honor has Gulliver witnessing an execution. While this scene is brief, it is shockingly graphic—again, as it realistically would be, if the circumstances of Gulliver’s story were so. There is much that could be said about capital punishment in England at this time, but for now, I will point out that executions (whether by hanging or otherwise) were very much public spectacles, forms of entertainment, and even considered “teachable moments” for children. (Here is a brief article giving some of this history.) By the end of the eighteenth century—partly as a result of so many, many crimes, even relatively petty ones becoming punishable by death—opposition to the death penalty (or at least the public spectacle aspect of it) was growing. In fact, evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and other members of the evangelical Clapham Sect came to oppose capital punishment on the grounds of its coarsening effects on society. (I write about this in my biography of Hannah More, Fierce Convictions.) I don’t recall anything Swift said for or against capital punishment, but in this passage, he certainly seems to be scrutinizing it as a form of entertainment. (To be clear, Swift is scrutinizing everything! From every angle! And perhaps that’s really the point of all this … to help us look sideways at things that are so familiar we no longer see them critically.)

We get our obligatory scatological moment when Gulliver attempts to jump over a cow-pie—but instead lands right in the middle of it. The is just one more humiliation for Gulliver. Swift’s “excremental vision,” as one critic calls it, serves to show how human pride is belied by the fallenness of the human condition. But it’s also important to note that this scene also echoes a scene in The Iliad when Ajax has a similar experience. Swift is always alluding to something, it seems. (This is why it’s helpful to have an annotated edition of classic works, much as we often have Bibles with notes. The Bible is sixty-six books, after all, and each alludes to the others just as great writers allude to other works in the literary canon.)

We reach the climax of this voyage (don’t worry, there’s still much more to come) in the scenes when Gulliver tells the king, over the course of several audiences, about his home country of England and about Europe. Here is where Swift’s satire is strong, my friends.

After putting the king in his place by telling him that in Europe reason is believed to have an inverse relationship to size, Gulliver brags about the virtues of his home in terms that are clearly the opposite of what Swift knows to be true.

Gulliver tells the king, for example, that parliament,

… consisted of an assembly called the House of Commons, who were all principal gentlemen, freely picked and culled out by the people themselves, for their great abilities and love of their country, to represent the wisdom of the whole nation. And that these two bodies made up the most august assembly in Europe; to whom, in conjunction with the prince, the whole legislature is committed.

The judges and courts, he says, exist

… for determining the disputed rights and properties of men, as well as for the punishment of vice and protection of innocence. I mentioned the prudent management of our treasury; the valour and achievements of our forces, by sea and land.

Um, no. I think that Swift thought his nation’s government was as corrupt as I think ours is today. Or at least in the same ballpark. (How do you measure such things anyway? I guess you can’t, so you write a satire.)

Satire can only work when there is a norm against which the vice or folly being critiqued can be measured. In this section Swift gives that normative voice to the king. Like the best kind of teacher or philosopher who uses Socratic dialogue, the king asks Gulliver good questions—the answers to which would lead Gulliver—and the reader—to greater wisdom. These questions to Gulliver are posed for several paragraphs, at the end of which the king observes (in a voice I suspect to be awfully close to the voice of Swift):

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.”

Then, at the end of chapter six, we get the mic drop:

“My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Wow. The “most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” (Tell us what you really think, your Royal Highness!)

This is perhaps the sharpest rebuke to European/English pride in the work. But it’s important to point out something else about this passage related to the character of the king. His words are harsh (and perhaps truthful) but notice how he delivers them. Gulliver says that in saying them, he took little Gulliver into his hands and stroked him gently.

Unlike the emperor of Lilliput, the Brobdingnagian king is kind. He speaks the truth in love. I think?

What’s next:

Next week, we will finish Part 2 of Gulliver’s Travels, which means we will be halfway through! We’ll keep up the two-chapters-a-week pace for now. Remember that we will have a break between Parts 2 and 3 for a brief discussion of Thomas More’s Utopia, which you can read (or not). Here is a print edition (affiliate link) and here is an online version.

Take a course with me!

Do you want to take a graduate course with me? Well, this year you have three opportunities to do so!

I will be returning to Institute for Christian Studies to teach a six-week online course centered on my book, The Evangelical Imagination (affiliate link), beginning in March. Details to come (watch this page).

I will be teaching a similar online course in June (once a week for four weeks) at Bethel Seminary. Details here. (Also, I have a discount code to offer for this course: SEM45)

Also in June, I will be teaching an in-person class at Regent College in Vancouver on Flannery O’Connor. Details here.

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil1

BOOK NOTE:

No specific book to note this week, but just a heads-up. As I continue to organize my books, I am finding duplicates, and often of new books (not newly published, but unused)! I will be putting a few of these aside and offering them as giveaways to paid subscribers. I feel like it’s a way to steward my collection and bless some of you who so generously support me. Sometimes I am given books by publishers in my role as a professor or as a reviewer/influencer, but embarrassingly, sometimes I buy the same book twice. That’s because my books have never been organized well. But soon that will change!

I’ve been thinking a lot about kindness lately—probably because there is such a lack of it in so many places. But kindness has a long history as a virtue in both the classical and the Christian tradition, where it is one of the “heavenly virtues.” I devote an entire chapter to it in my book On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books.1

In my essay today at The Dispatch, I discuss this virtue and its opposing vice. Can you guess what vice that is? The answer might surprise you!

Here’s an excerpt of the essay. I hope you will click through this link and read the whole thing. In it, I discuss research on the benefits of kindness, as well as the mind/body connection in history and art, including a shout-out to Charles Dickens. (You may need to get a free subscription to read the whole essay.)

Because kindness is a virtue, it must be tied to other virtues such as justice, courage, and prudence. Moreover, like all virtues, kindness moderates between an extreme of excess and an extreme of deficiency. Kindness is the balance between the vices of contrariness (or quarrelsomeness) and obsequiousness (or flattery). And, like all virtues, kindness has an opposing vice. Some assume the opposite of kindness is cruelty, but there is a longer tradition that, perhaps surprisingly, points to another vice as the one that directly opposes kindness: envy.

While kindness is essentially good will toward another, envy is ill will. Thomas Aquinas defines envy, simply, as “sorrow for another’s good.” While good will leads naturally to acts of kindness, ill will leads easily to cruelty—actions that increase the suffering, rather than the joys, of the object of envy. Envy arises from vainglory, Aquinas observes, and produces “daughters” of its own. Envy leads to gossip and defamation, joy at another’s pain, and pain in another’s joy.

Kindness is rooted in the desire to love one’s neighbor. Envy is rooted in the desire to best one’s neighbor. Envy culminates in hatred. Before Cain murdered his brother Abel, he envied him.

…

Envy consumes.

Kindness generates.

In chapters three and four, we are still getting the “lay of the land” in Brobdingnag and beginning to learn more about the ruling class—the queen, the king, and their court. We also get more hilarious and harrowing high jinks, once again, on account of Gulliver’s relative size in this country. The image of him nearly drowning in a cup of cream and slashing at wasps with his sword are among these unforgettable scenes.

But within the humor, some pointed observations about human nature emerge (as is to be expected).

Let’s start with Gulliver’s new nemesis—the queen’s dwarf (the one responsible for dropping him in that bowl of cream):

Nothing angered and mortified me so much as the queen’s dwarf; who being of the lowest stature that was ever in that country (for I verily think he was not full thirty feet high), became so insolent at seeing a creature so much beneath him, that he would always affect to swagger and look big as he passed by me in the queen’s antechamber, while I was standing on some table talking with the lords or ladies of the court, and he seldom failed of a smart word or two upon my littleness; against which I could only revenge myself by calling him brother, challenging him to wrestle, and such repartees as are usually in the mouths of court pages.

The dwarf is thrilled to have, at last, someone he can bully. But there’s more at play here that I think is worth examining.

This passage reminds me of key insights from the French literary critic René Girard. Girard is most famous for his theory of mimetic desire which postulates that many of our desires come from the models in front of us whom we come to want to imitate (these models can be positive or negative, as can our desires). Because humans are innately imitative, Girard argues, even the things we desire can be cultivated by the models in front of us (which is why advertising works!). But, as Girard also shows, the more we are like or become like our models, the more prone we are to see them as our rivals. We don’t see as rivals those who are far out of our league. Rather, we see as rivals those whose status or accomplishments are ones to which we might reasonably, too.

Luke Burgis explains Girard’s ideas brilliantly and helpfully in Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (one of the most insightful books I’ve read in the past decade—really). Burgis explains that we have two kinds of models: those who are “outside our immediate world” and those who are “inside” it. These are called external mediators of desire and internal mediators of desire. We might emulate a celebrity doing something we admire, but we’d not see that person as a competitor or rival. Real rivalry, Burgis writes, “is a function of proximity.”1 A rival is a mediator of desire who is close to us. A high school football player doesn’t see an NFL player as a rival (though he may be a mimetic model). But a fellow student player, perhaps even one at the college level the high schooler expects to soon achieve, can be a rival.

Thus, this mutual rivalry between Gulliver and the dwarf makes perfect sense. Because of their relative similarity in size and function (the court’s entertainment), they are competing for the same or similar status and place in the court. The dwarf’s reaction to his rival is very insightful about this aspect of human nature: he becomes insolent, swaggers, and bullies Gulliver. Gulliver, in turn, calls him “brother” and challenges him to wrestle. None of these are actions that would make any psychological sense between, say, Gulliver and Glumdalclitch or Gulliver and the prince. Rivalries require enough similarity for the tension, jealousy, and insecurity to arise. I mean this in all seriousness (not as a flippant insult) when I say that I see a lot of this behavior in certain church and denominational circles where insecurity, sycophancy, and resources cultivate fierce rivalries. Of course, it exists in other places—academia, publishing, politics, and so on. But there are some places where one might think that transcendent, shared beliefs and values would make it not so. But one would be wrong.

The next two passages I want to consider within these two chapters are ones which, once again, depend on perspective relative to the size difference.

The first is in chapter three when the queen suggests that Gulliver is cowardly because he seems so frightened by things that—from her perspective—are so trivial: flies (and later wasps). Of course, this is humorous, especially as Gulliver wages such war on these pests in defense of himself. But it’s also poignant. The queen cannot see how dangerous these insects are to Gulliver because she sees them only from her perspective. The queen is operating from a place of privilege, and from that place she simply cannot see how what is not dangerous to her is dangerous to Gulliver. Of course, there are many analogies that could be drawn here. This simple, silly scene is a pointed reminder that when others feel danger that we don’t see or understand, we need to try to see things from their perspective. This is what we call empathy.

In chapter four, Gulliver encounters a group of beggars as he’s taken out and about in the comfort of his “open sedan” (carried by a servant on horseback—Gulliver is really living his best life now!). This scene offers another opportunity for us to see through Gulliver’s eyes, close up, the horrors of the broken, sick, lousy (literally) human body as if through a microscope. But the scene offers more than a visual spectacle. By making the pains and ills of these vulnerable people so large, it also lets us “see” them—their pain and suffering—up close. These are people easy to overlook both in Gulliver’s day and our own. Swift seems to be saying, “Don’t look away!

Finally, going back to chapter three, there is an important passage that foreshadows some things to come. Again, this is related to physical size but is ultimately metaphysical. The prince enjoys talking with Gulliver but seems unable to take a creature of such inconsequential size seriously, much to Gulliver’s chagrin.

This prince took a pleasure in conversing with me, inquiring into the manners, religion, laws, government, and learning of Europe; wherein I gave him the best account I was able. His apprehension was so clear, and his judgment so exact, that he made very wise reflections and observations upon all I said. But I confess, that, after I had been a little too copious in talking of my own beloved country, of our trade and wars by sea and land, of our schisms in religion, and parties in the state; the prejudices of his education prevailed so far, that he could not forbear taking me up in his right hand, and stroking me gently with the other, after a hearty fit of laughing, asked me, “whether I was a whig or tory?” Then turning to his first minister, who waited behind him with a white staff, near as tall as the mainmast of the Royal Sovereign, he observed “how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I: and yet,” says he, “I dare engage these creatures have their titles and distinctions of honour; they contrive little nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray!” And thus he continued on, while my colour came and went several times, with indignation, to hear our noble country, the mistress of arts and arms, the scourge of France, the arbitress of Europe, the seat of virtue, piety, honour, and truth, the pride and envy of the world, so contemptuously treated.

Note this delicious Swiftian irony: “I had been a little too copious in talking of my own beloved country, of our trade and wars by sea and land, of our schisms in religion, and parties in the state; the prejudices of his education prevailed so far …” It is not the prince whose prejudices blind him; it is Gulliver. Gulliver cannot see that trade and wars and schisms and parties (divisions) are not things to boast about. And, once again, Swift’s primary target of satire—pride—comes up. this time in Gulliver’s boasts about his home country.

Gulliver is ever the loyal patriot to his home country. But Swift is a bit more circumspect about any human pretensions to grandeur.

Slowly, Gulliver begins to take on the perspective about himself that these giants have:

But as I was not in a condition to resent injuries, so upon mature thoughts I began to doubt whether I was injured or no. For, after having been accustomed several months to the sight and converse of this people, and observed every object upon which I cast my eyes to be of proportionable magnitude, the horror I had at first conceived from their bulk and aspect was so far worn off, that if I had then beheld a company of English lords and ladies in their finery and birth-day clothes, acting their several parts in the most courtly manner of strutting, and bowing, and prating, to say the truth, I should have been strongly tempted to laugh as much at them as the king and his grandees did at me. Neither, indeed, could I forbear smiling at myself, when the queen used to place me upon her hand towards a looking-glass, by which both our persons appeared before me in full view together; and there could be nothing more ridiculous than the comparison; so that I really began to imagine myself dwindled many degrees below my usual size.

Just as in Lilliput, Gulliver is losing his sense of self to his surroundings. And we, dear readers, kid ourselves if we think that we don’t do the same.

What’s next:

We’ll keep up the two-chapters-a-week pace for now. Remember that we will have a break between Parts 2 and 3 for a brief discussion of Thomas More’s Utopia, which you can read (or not). Here is a print edition (affiliate link) and here is an online version.

Take a course with me!

Do you want to take a graduate course with me? Well, this year you have three opportunities to do so!

I will be returning to Institute for Christian Studies to teach a six-week online course centered on my book, The Evangelical Imagination (affiliate link), beginning in March. Details to come (watch this page).

I will be teaching a similar online course in June (once a week for four weeks) at Bethel Seminary. Details here. (Also, I have a discount code to offer for this course: SEM45)

Also in June, I will be teaching an in-person class at Regent College in Vancouver on Flannery O’Connor. Details here.

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil2

BOOK NOTE:

This book—Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis—isn’t brand new, but it is one I read recently and that I cited this week. I did a book club last year centered on the work of René Girard, and it was a stimulating several weeks of reading and discussion. Afterward, I finally picked up this volume (which I’d had for a while) and read it (and listened to some on Audible, too—it’s a great listen as well). I have been familiar with Girard as a literary critic for some years. But I really had not understood, first, how much practical application there is to these theories today, or, second, how much Girard has influenced the folks who are bringing us social media, AI, and algorithms. Yikes. Anyway, Burgis makes these theories understandable, relatable, and compelling. Honestly, this book helped me understand more than anything else I’ve read in the past decade what is happening in the world and in my own world. Here is my affiliate link if you are interested in it and want to support my work by purchasing it through the link: paperback, hardcover, and audible editions.

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